(IPR, January 2011)

“The root cause of the crisis is to be found in the moral bankruptcy of Irish political culture.  As a result we became accustomed to regarding the marketplace and the forces within it, plus the entire commercial sphere, as moral free zones”

— that is the view of T.P. O’Mahony in a series in the Evening Echo (Cork) called ‘Renewing The Republic’.  And O’Mahony knows when the rot set in:

“Unquestionably… the moral ground on which our political culture was based shifted decisively the moment Charles Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch in December 1979.  Where there was incompetence before, we now had incompetence plus corruption and we have lived with the legacy of low standards in high places since…”

O’Mahony says he is not talking about bedroom morality.  When I first heard of Haughey it was in the form of gossip about his loose sexual morality.  I heard it from Trotskyist Republicans and thought it strange that Marxists should be prying into these things.  And I thought it must be a good thing to have a free liver in the public life of prudish middle class Dublin.  For the rest, it seemed that he was resented because he was unusually hard-working and competent and little given to waffle, moral or otherwise.

But it has to be accepted that Haughey is hated in Cork because it is Jack Lynch’s town.  I even found that he was hated out in the country by people who were profiting from what he did for the cattle industry.

Maybe that’s what morality means now—irrational opinion.  It used to mean the customary opinion of a stable society.  But that meant that it was different in different places. And that is not acceptable today. So it has been universalised;  and it has been transcendentalised in order to make it universal.  And, when morality is liberated from custom, I don’t know that it can have much definite meaning.  It must mean: whatever you fancy.

Back in the 1950s, living in the depths of rural Ireland and finding myself out of joint with things that were spreading into the country from the towns, I set about figuring out the world for myself.  I used to get books posted to me from a bookshop in Cork City but, when I ordered ‘Beyond Good And Evil’  [Nietzsche] it refused to deal with me anymore.

On the other hand, I was working as a labourer in the local Creamery, and such things were discussed freely there.  First and Last Things were taken with a pinch of salt.  And, if in practical life things were done which could not be approved of as a general rule, but the doing of them relieved a particular situation, then they were done but not taken official account of.

There was art, or artfulness, in that way of life.  And the things that have been the subject of Tribunal investigations in recent years did not happen in it.

I only realised much later that one of my best friends as a boy was illegitimate.  But that did not mean that illegitimacy was approved of.  It was disapproved of, but nothing was made of it.  Where is the morality of that?

Haughey introduced the much-ridiculed “Irish solution for an Irish problem”.  Was that moral, or what?  (Did its immorality consist of not being an English solution?  In the 1960s there were still restrictions on contraceptive culture in England.  That changed in the 1970s.  Irish backwardness, or immorality, consisted of not keeping pace with English changes.)

Two things stand out in Jack Lynch’s period as Taoiseach:  the prosecution on the basis of no evidence of Haughey, Captain Kelly, John Kelly, Neil Blaney and Albert Luykx for conspiracy to import arms illegally, and the administrative over-ruling of the Not Guilty verdict;  and the abolition of Domestic Rates.

O’Mahony published a biography of Lynch in which the Arms Trials are not mentioned. And T. Ryle Dwyer, in the Examiner (a companion paper of the Echo) says that—

“the attempted gun running behind the Arms Crisis was grossly irresponsible.  The whole thing was not, as we were, just told a scheme to help the nationalist community to defend themselves.  It was a crazy conspiracy o end partition by provoking war if necessary” (10 Dec. 2011).

Lynch had his case put at the Trials, where it became evident that he had no case.  The situation, as brought out at the Trials and confirmed by secret documents released thirty years later, was that there had been an entirely legal attempt, within the chain of command under the Minister of Defence, at a covert import of arms.

Why Lynch instituted a prosecution which could not be supported with evidence is a matter for speculation.  That he did so is indisputable.  And that he did what he could to punish those who had been found Not Guilty is also certain.

Was there no degradation of public morality in that?  (The reason for the attempt at covert importation was so that the State would have some weapons that the British Government did not know about.  It was done on Lynch’s authority as Taoiseach.  It would not have been necessary if the State had any arms industry of its own.

And the abolition of Domestic Rates in the 1977 election campaign:  did that not feed into the property boom that led to the collapse?

But what have facts to do with history these days!  History is the fable we agree upon, as Senator Harris said—or was it Napoleon?  (Ten or fifteen years ago O’Mahony had an encounter with Professor Keogh who ran the University down the road.  He suggested Ireland should make use of the ‘Famine’ in the way Israel makes use of the Holocaust.  Keogh jumped on him.

Keogh, an Irish Press journalist at the time, had a nightmare about Fascism at the time when the Government allowed the British Embassy to be burned in order to let off steam over the Bloody Sunday murders—is that the right word?

He subsequently made himself an academic;  dedicated himself to a campaign against ‘irredentism‘;  glorified Jack Lynch, who never ceased to be irredentist on the subject of Partition as far as I know;  aligned himself with Zionism, the greatest irredentism there has ever been;  and visited Israel, hosted by the Government, around the time of his dispute with O’Mahony and refused to comment on the Palestinian Intifada caused by irredentist Jewish colonisation.

It’s a pity O’Mahony let himself be put off the ‘Famine’ issue by Keogh, and drawn into superficial and ephemeral moral chatter.  Morality today is a propaganda fashion of the passing moment.  It is not a custom.  It is not a stable cultural element in a way of life.  It is dreamed up from day to day, and has been cut adrift even from the business of reproducing the species.

The system of Good and Evil, that commercial Ireland prevented me from getting a book about in the 1950s, has collapsed.  The words continue to be used but what was Good yesterday may be Evil tomorrow.  And the only constant Evil seems to be the system of actual morality that is persisting in the world as a way of life, despite our efforts to dissipate it.

It is this Evil that now gives us our sense of Good.  We are good, because at least we are not Muslim.

Tackling the ‘Famine’ brings one into engagement with a very different order of things.  The greatest Empire in the world availed of the potato blight to bring about a drastic reduction in the Catholic population of Ireland, but it doesn’t want it to be remembered that way.

The Irish ‘Famine’ was one of many ‘Famines’ that it brought about in the course of improving the world and giving it a sophisticated moral sense.

But the fixing of this moral sense requires that raw memory of the event should be overcome.  It is better to remember that one million died as a consequence of the potato blight, despite the best efforts of the Empire to keep them alive, than to discover that perhaps four millions died with the approval of the Empire.  It was good that the population was culled so drastically, but it would not have been good to remember it in those terms.  So it was arranged that it should be remembered in other terms.

(At the time Isaac Butt, a strong Imperialist at the outset, was so disillusioned by what he saw being done that he barely held himself back from bringing a charge of genocide against his class, and he became a defender of Fenians and a Home Ruler.)

The author of Beyond Good And Evil, writing in a situation in which the traditional morality of custom had been undermined and the propaganda morality of Imperial manipulation was taking its place, observed that the history of morality was immoral.  He groped for an unparadoxical morality that was not immoral, but didn’t find it.  Urban Ireland thought in the 1950s it had found it, and would not let me read his book.

What has urban Ireland made of itself since then?  O’Mahony, grasping at moral straws within the flux, suggests that class differentiation is what led us astray:

“One startling illustration of this has been highlighted by Fintan O’Toole…  ‘In the last three years of the boom… the richest 450 people in Ireland added 41 bn to their combined personal wealth.  Yet somehow Irish people went on believing that they lived in a relatively classless society’.  We may be uncomfortable with the notion of a society divided on ‘class’ lines, partly because many of us tend to think ‘class’ is a distinctly British thing, yet there is no denying that there is an Ireland of the ‘haves’ and an Ireland of the ‘have-nots’ and it is the former who have exerted most influence on our political culture.  It may well be that those who argue that, right from the inception of the new State in 1922, powerful vested interests used their financial and political clout to ‘distort’ the culture of politics to their advantage have an arguable case…  Unquestionably, though, the moral ground… shifted decisively the moment Charles Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch…”

James Connolly would be shocked, he says.  In the recent competition to find the greatest Irishman ever, Joe Duffy sponsored Connolly on the ground that he advocated upward social mobility, and I did not see that he was ridiculed.  That was proof that Connolly now stands for nothing in the public mind.  He can even be presented as a Yuppie.

As to class, the absence of it is what bedevils urban Ireland.  Mere income difference is not class, particularly when the ‘have-nots’ have quite a bit.  One problem is that the ‘haves’ don’t quite know what they are and what to do with themselves.

Cultural class is English, and the English are hanging onto it for dear life.  Class as a mere current phenomenon, detached from the past, is threadbare in England, but the class culture of the past continues to be reconstructed lovingly year after year in television and literature, and there is a sufficient residue of the old class culture at the top for the upwardly mobile to get some satisfaction from entering it, so that they do not feel that all they are is stinking rich.

In Ireland there has long been a yearning on the part of the rich for the distinction of class.  The socio-cultural vacuum at the top devalues the striving to get there, and creates a yearning for that world of decorative marvels connected with The Queen.  John Paul McCarthy, upwardly mobile from Cork City, exudes satisfaction in his Sunday Independent column, having reached at least the foothills of Paradise with some little position at Oxford University, where ancient posturings continue.

It must be admitted that the Republic has failed to make adequate provision for snobbery, and this inadequacy has generated in certain quarters a yearning for The Queen.

It is not something I have any feel for.  In Sliabh Luachra there was no sense of anything missing.  But it is evident our rich in their immaturity have need of The Queen.  C.C. O’Brien spoke for them when he scouted the idea of Republican virtue.

In the country of The Queen, the hierarchy of class culture has been the bearer of morality—the framework of morality—indeed morality itself.

And it seems to me that one reason for the profound hatred of Haughey is that he behaved with the utter self-confidence that characterised members of the English ruling class, while being altogether unEnglish.

That was bewildering.

Brendan Clifford