I often disagree with John Waters, but rarely feel moved to challenge his reflections. But last Monday's column puts forward a thesis so dangerous, because it is so attractive to selfish people in our society, that it demands a prompt and unambiguous response.
His thesis that morality is confined to unspecified "immutable principles", "a set of noble, abstract principles", and is unconnected with obligations to others in society, must be flatly rejected.
Morality concerns the notion of right and wrong. At an individual level we feel wronged by somebody who breaks a promise to us or treats us with cruelty, and we are capable of recognising that if we behave in that way to somebody else, we have wronged that person.
It is, in fact, very difficult to think of moral issues in isolation from our relationship with other people. Human beings live in society: there is not and never has been a situation in which we have lived isolated lives, out of contact with and never interacting with others.
Man is an inherently social animal. To confine morality to one-to-one relationships, and to deny that social relations involving the interactions of peoples within groups equally involve moral issues, is to deny the essentially social character of our species.
All human societies develop rules for the social interaction of their members, and those members accept in principle both the moral necessity and moral force of such rules - even if from time to time they may disagree with, or seek to change, a particular rule or rules. A society in which people did not feel morally as well as legally bound by such social rules, and consequently decided that they had a right to ignore them if they thought they could get away with doing so, would quickly cease to be viable.
To reject in principle the morally binding character of rules designed to enable society to function - as distinct from holding the right to seek to have a particular rule - is in fact a most dangerous form of anarchy.
Some breaches of these rules may have relatively few negative effects on society, and thus carry less moral force than others. Moreover, rules devised and enforced by a public authority lacking the consent of society and which are unjust may be lacking in moral authority.
But in an organised democratic society, in which a legitimate government provides public services and looks after the poor and disadvantaged, the moral obligation to pay lawfully levied taxes is compelling. Tax evasion by some in society must either require others to pay more or else must ultimately force the government to cut back on the services or redistributive measures which the electorate, through their support for that government, have determined to be necessary in the public interest.
There is and can be no ambiguity - John Waters's term - about tax evasion, which is uniquely immoral, because it is the only way by which people can, in effect, steal from everybody else in society, including the very poorest. John Waters claims a moral right for individuals to reject the decisions of our parliament by arrogating to themselves a right to determine how much tax they should pay.
Let me quote what he wrote last Monday - and this is not the first time he has made a claim of this kind: "Not long ago, social life in most parts of Ireland depended on tax evasion: if people paid what the authorities demanded, everybody would have gone out of business".
Far from tax evasion keeping people in business, it was the massive scale of tax evasion that made it necessary for taxes to be high so as to prevent the State from going bankrupt. It also led to public services like the hospitals being cut back to an extent that postponed treatment caused great hardship and in some cases may even have deprived people of their right to life. And let no one say that we did not know at that time that tax avoidance and evasion existed on a massive and crippling scale. In addition to the phenomenon of massive understatement of income by tens of thousands of taxpayers, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them very well-off, were abusing the provision for tax exemption on small savings by spreading their money over multiple accounts. It was because of this massive diversion of resources away from the Exchequer that as Taoiseach, on the suggestion of my economic adviser, I initiated the DIRT tax in 1986.
The enforcement of this tax would, I believed, flush out those who by their selfish lawlessness were effectively helping to bleed to death the State - and through the State our whole society.
Unhappily, my DIRT initiative was shamefully sabotaged by some still unidentified person in the Revenue Commissioners who arrogated to himself the right to instruct his subordinates not to enforce the law. We are, apparently, now expected to believe that no one in the Revenue Commissioners knew then or since who gave this obviously illegal instruction - one that was, however, obeyed to the letter by its officials for a decade thereafter.
If I sound angry about the way in which that civil servant successfully defied the authority of a democratic government, it is because I am angry - and have been angry ever since this deplorable situation was exposed by the Public Accounts Committee. John Waters says that "not all forms of theft are morally wrong". He is, of course, right in this: a poor and hungry person stealing food in order to survive is not acting wrongly. But those who by tax evasion steal from poor as well as rich are most certainly wrong.
No doubt in expressing myself in these terms I am exposing myself to that apparently most damaging of accusations, that of "taking the high moral ground". But there is nothing high about the moral ground on which denunciations of tax evasion rest: insistence on the immorality of this practice is the lowest common denominator of social cohesion.
A particularly disturbing feature of John Waters's article is the rebuke to any clergy who might dare to criticise tax evasion. He says that "it is ludicrous to hear people demand that clergymen express opinion on such matters, and more so when they oblige". This is arrogance indeed: the clergy are to confine themselves to matters that John Waters thinks it appropriate for them and to ignore a crime against the poor - the very kind of crime, I recall being taught, that cries out to heaven for justice.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie