Values such as truth-telling went down the Swanee during the Celtic Tiger years
YOU CAN tell a lot about a society by whom it decides to reward. About 250 people turned out in Thurles to support Michael Lowry after a tribunal of inquiry spoke of his “cynical and venal abuse of office”.
Before that, more than 14,000 people rewarded him with first-preference votes in the general election. It has been plausibly suggested that if the Moriarty findings had appeared before the election, it would have increased that number.
Obviously, many people in Tipperary feel that Lowry is hard done by and needs support. It is only a few spoilsports like Canon Stephen Neill who object. He and a Fianna Fáil councillor resigned from a school board of management in protest because Lowry was allowed to use students to send home a letter claiming credit for a new school.
Again, apparently no one finds this practice odd – that a politician should claim credit for a new school. Was a school needed? If so, the citizens merely got what their children were entitled to.
When you talk to Lowry’s constituents, they talk about his hard work, his team, his ability to deliver, how good he is for the constituency. They don’t mention sums of money wending their way in a serpentine fashion in and out of accounts. Such details are for little people.
And did we need such a phenomenally expensive tribunal merely to increase Lowry’s first- preference vote? Monetary compensation is a primary way in which society measures value.
Obviously, the legal people who served the Moriarty tribunal are very valuable people indeed. One barrister who acted for the Moriarty tribunal has made €9,490,181.
What, exactly, would a human being have to do to be worth that kind of money? Seán FitzPatrick was asked a number of years ago to justify his salary, then €2.3 million, and had no difficulty doing so, comparing it to the sums paid to footballers.
FitzPatrick suggested before the last budget that the government hit the “sacred cow” of universal child benefit, State pensions and medical cards for the over-70s.
We are outraged now at the memory, but why did we accept a situation for so long where CEOs and senior managers are paid an obscene multiple of what ordinary workers are paid?
There have been cases in the United States where the ratio between senior executive jobs and the average wages is something like 500 to 1. It does not have to be this way. There are countries, very different ones such as Japan and Sweden, where the same levels of income inequality do not exist.
The foremost Basque business group and the seventh largest in Spain is a co-operative called Mondragon. Mondragon is an extraordinary story, where workers put their own money into the enterprise, vote for their boards and 10 per cent of profits must be used for the common good.
It started life with a 3-1 ratio between the lowest paid and the highest paid. It is now 15-1, largely because managers kept being poached by other companies who saw how good they are. There is a great deal of soul-searching in Mondragon about the negative impact of managers being paid so much more.
Here, we tolerated outrageous salaries and compensation packages for people until the money ran out. Then we discovered outrage again. It was clear during the last election, and before it, that “taxpayer” had become a synonym for citizen. What a reductionist view of human beings.
Other values, such as truth- telling and ethical practice, also went down the Swanee during the Celtic Tiger years. We embraced so-called “light-touch” regulation, but abandoned the idea that profit is not an end in itself, that there are other goods to be served.
During the Celtic Tiger era, we swapped virtues for their more flexible friends, values. Mention of virtues in relation to the economy and business usually leads to eye-rolling, with Christian virtues being particularly derided as naive, unworldly and having no place in the dog-eat-dog world of business.
We have had a decade where virtue was for wimps and we can see where that brought us. Nothing will change in our society until we begin to reward people not for being casually and venally corrupt, but for living up to high standards that put the common good first.
bobrien@irishtimes.com