Time to show we are no longer suckers

We have to decide that if you’re part of a toxic past, you’re not well placed to represent a decent future

THE IRISH motto: avoid disappointment, expect nothing. Usually, when a society’s institutions implode, three things happen: revolution, disappointment, counter-revolution. There is a wave of change. Its results don’t match the more utopian expectations. The old regime attempts to strike back.

In Ireland, it seems, we’ve decided to short-circuit this process. We’ll move straight from the implosion to the counter-revolution, missing out entirely on the revolution and avoiding the disappointment. Who says we’re inefficient?

Two things are at stake on Thursday: our political culture and our political institutions. As things stand, the likelihood is that we will end up with a resounding statement that we’re happy both with our existing political culture and with the way our political institutions work.

Given the catastrophic failure of that culture and those institutions, this is quite astounding.

The political culture that got us where we are today was characterised by the dominance of Fianna Fáil, by a cynical populism in which voters are told whatever they want to hear, by a toxic intimacy between business and politics, by the encouragement of a business ethic that valued property over sustainable innovation, and by a lax attitude to legality. If you wanted to embody that culture, you would have to find someone who has boasted of his association with Charles Haughey, long after it was known that Haughey was a kleptocrat; who promises to create jobs even though he knows very well that he cannot do so; who has been up to his neck in the system of political fundraising that sidelined the interests of ordinary citizens; who rode the property boom and who has declared himself “happy” with transactions that were in flagrant breach of company law. Finding someone who ticks every one of those boxes is almost as amazing as the idea of making him president.

But perhaps equally extraordinary is the straight-faced intervention of a consortium of former attorneys general urging us to vote against the referendums on judges’ pay and on Oireachtas inquiries.

Their opposition to the first of these referendums should in itself be a warning not to take their views on the second with too much gravity. But there is a good chance that they will in fact help to defeat the referendum on Oireachtas inquiries and therefore to stop the process of modest political reform before it has actually begun.

Now, I’m sure all of these men have acted out of a genuine sense of public duty. But three of them might have had the grace to point out that they could possibly have a little bit of a personal stake in the issue.

Peter Sutherland was criticised by the Dirt inquiry in relation to his role as chairman of Allied Irish Banks, and the experience is unlikely to have endeared him to the notion of Oireachtas inquiries. He also opposed the idea of an inquiry into the banking catastrophe (“We need to look to the future”). Dermot Gleeson, as chairman of AIB through the years of madness (chairman’s speech to the agm, April 2006: “Asset quality, that’s to say the quality of our loans, is at a historically high level”), would certainly have been called before such an inquiry, had the Oireachtas been able to mount one. And Michael McDowell just might be called to account for one of the most spectacular wastages of public money, the €45 million we’ve so far spent on his grand prison project at Thornton Hall, which may never house a single prisoner.

The fact that such men oppose the referendum on Oireachtas inquiries (albeit for the purest of reasons) is not a bad argument in its favour.

A common theme in the votes on Thursday is the infantilisation of politics and politicians. Public contempt for the way politics has been conducted is entirely justified. But it translates, not into a demand for sweeping change, but into that old Irish fatalism: sure, what can you expect, aren’t they all the same? We’re locked in a vicious circle. We have very low expectations of politicians, so we don’t let them do anything serious. And the fact that they don’t do anything serious confirms that we were right to have contempt for them in the first place.

The other common theme is accountability. We don’t do accountability. So we’re suckers for anyone who pops up from Fianna Fáil to tell us to forget the past and “look to the future” – precisely what Peter Sutherland told us in relation to a banking inquiry.

Never mind that lack of accountability is precisely what has destroyed the lives of so many Irish people – in our culture, amnesia translates into optimism. Never mind the notion that if you don’t deal with the culture that created the catastrophe, you’re doomed to repeat it.

We have to break these cycles some time. We have to decide that if you’re part of a toxic past, you’re not well placed to represent a decent future.

We have to stop having low expectations of politicians and then whingeing when they amply fulfil them. We have to risk disappointment by having some hope of real change.