The tribunal of inquiry has been Irish society's greatest discovery of the 1990s. It was a perfect device for journalists and the new breed of politician, who shared a fascination with the superficialities of Irish society, to carry on the various kinds of pretence which they so earnestly desire to maintain.
It allowed us to dig up the past in a selective way, so as to dramatise our imagined progression without admitting what was really at the root of our collective ill-health. All of the issues which tribunals have been instituted to investigate in recent years have been the inevitable consequence of a history which the advocates of such inquiries have simultaneously been intent on denying.
All have centred on aspects of Irish life which are the direct consequence of colonialism, interference and enslavement, but the purpose of investigating such phenomena in this way is to conceal rather than expose this.
When a nation suffers 800 years of slavery, it is prudent to expect certain things and not be surprised by certain others. There is a pattern to such experience, which will perhaps one day be recognised as scientific reality. A society recently freed will begin to behave in an inevitable and predictable fashion. First, it will spawn an elite of its own, to replace that which has been driven back to the mother country.
This elite will inevitably be marked by certain characteristics: arrogance coupled with incompetence, greed combined with an inability to produce anything worthwhile, and a craven desire to ingratiate itself with outsiders, matched only by a profound contempt for the native people. With such a band in control, the new society lurches forward along predestined lines. In the first surges of patriotism, a crude and primitive indigenous economy is subjected to the life-support of protectionism in the hope that some spontaneous convalescence will occur.
When this fails, as it always does, the elite turns outwards to the wider world and begins to investigate ways of supporting itself without having to undertake a full cultural realisation from within. On the basis of invitation and enticement, an economy is constructed which is, in effect, a cuckoo in the nest. More and more, the affairs of the nation are arranged so as to accommodate the wishes of external interests.
The education system, being part of the colonial heritage, perpetuates the process of imitation, ingratiation and subservience, and concentrates on servicing the cuckoo economy. The very culture of the nation is adapted for the benefit of tourists. The absence of a civic sensibility enables the emergence of family fiefdoms and dynasties, characterised by grandiosity and pretension. The political movements which led the people to independence descend into petty corruption, and the pursuit of private advantage, combining autocracy with a shallow populism based on sentiment and greed.
BECAUSE of the nature of the underlying condition, much of this presents itself as positive change. The breaking away of the political system from the wishes of the people, for example, is perceived as the expression of a modern impulse to generate conditions of legality and egalitarianism in place of clientelism and patronage. Meanwhile, the political parties are in the grip of a patronage which is all the more sinister because it is legal.
Everything we now seek to "investigate" has its roots in this condition: planning abuses, tax evasion, the petty corruption of the beef industry, Charles Haughey's subsidised lifestyle etc. The function of the public inquiries, however, is to bury rather than uncover this truth. What we are saying with these tribunals, to ourselves and, even more importantly, to the wider world, is that we are shocked to find such evidence of primitive abuses in such a modern society.
We wish to articulate this sense of shock to the whole world, so that everyone will know how civilised and modern we are. Imitating the legalistic approaches of our European neighbours, we affect to be surprised and indignant at uncovering such scandal in our midst.
Take, for example, the beef tribunal. Notwithstanding the incompetence of the elite, some aspects of the life of the nation will unavoidably be characterised by attempts to realise some autonomous life. These, however, will suffer by comparison with the imported models, and will therefore be subject to the suspicion and contempt of the ruling elite. Hence the beef tribunal, the chief achievement of which was to uncover previously unsuspected levels of greed among the legal profession.
In truth, we should have been investigating not why the Irish beef industry was subject to corruption, but how on earth we managed to have a beef industry at all. We should have been congratulating ourselves that this at least remained in native hands, and seeking to find ways in which we could replicate this success in other areas. Similarly, the story of Charles Haughey might more usefully be studied for its lessons in what occurs to societies with no knowledge of democracy except through imitation of external experiences, and for its less-than-flattering reflection of our own craven desires for the comforting signs of opulence in our leaders.
It is not an accident that the three Taoisigh before the present incumbent were millionaires. Although the whole world can see that the Celtic Tiger economy is founded on the principle of tax evasion by multinational industry, its curators and beneficiaries purport to be intent on rooting out all such wrongdoing wherever it may occur. Who do we imagine we're fooling?
There has been a strong tendency in the age of self-awareness which dawned with the 1960s to present the trajectory of our political affairs as emerging from the darkness of sub-modernity and moving towards the light of the final European home. One of the symptoms of our modern hubris, however, is that this sub-modernity is rarely given its true context - in the historical experience of occupation, interference and abuse - but is credited, as its architects ordained, to the intrinsic backwardness of the native people. Public life in this country is characterised by one impulse above all others, the desire to pretend that the centuries of our slavery did not occur. We seek to extract from political affairs the kind of lessons which will make us believe more in what we have decided to become.
In these tribunals we imagine ourselves temporarily on the outside looking in on ourselves, suggesting alterations and amendments to bring us into line with our ideal images of ourselves, unaware that these ideal images derive from centuries of indoctrination by our enslavers. If we can simply expunge the wrongdoer, we imagine, we can be as pure as the blueprint has promised.
If we were serious about uncovering corruption in our society, we would establish a nonjudgmental inquiry along the lines of the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings, with amnesties for those who tell the truth and sanctions for those who do not. But that would itself involve a fundamental admission about the nature of Irish society, one which we will never allow.