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Elaine Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland: A Crooked Harp? (2012)

Nationalists usually described British rule in Ireland as being not only tyrannical and anti-national, but also as being inherently corrupt. The passing of the Union, the use of paid informers and the packing of juries to get the ‘right’ verdict were pointed to. The notorious case of Sadlier and Keogh, two popular leaders who were easily bought off by the Crown in the 1850s and the attempt by The Times, with the alleged connivance of the Conservative Party, to frame Parnell for conspiracy to murder were commonly cited. The spectacle of landlords happily pocketing rents in the midst of the Great Famine was continually harped on. It was noisily claimed that Ireland under the Union had been systematically overtaxed. The fact that public employment in Ireland commonly favoured Protestants over Catholics until the end of the nineteenth century was often pointed to as well. Native rule, it was implied tacitly, would be none of these things; it would be patriotic and even-handed, it would give justice without fear or favour and it would usher in a new era of public virtue.

Independent Ireland was a small place, with inherent tendencies toward the formation of monopolies because of that smallness. The ideology of the nationalists claimed that the union with Britain had worked to Ireland’s disadvantage, Ireland having no product in which it had a comparative advantage other than cattle. In other words, the union had turned Ireland outside eastern Ulster into England’s cattle ranch. Protectionism was touted as the remedy. It should be remembered that protectionism was being practiced by everyone else; there was little untrammelled international free trade in the world in the 1920s.

It seems incredible that the first systematic academic book on political corruption in independent Ireland only appeared in 2012. Political Corruption in Ireland is thoroughgoing and informative. It confirms the popular impression that government corruption in Ireland, although present from the beginning in the form of clientelism and preference being given to political allies of the party in power under both William Cosgrave’s government of 1923–32 and Eamon de Valera’s early governments from 1932 onward, intensified after 1960 or thereabouts. Corruption levels correlate strongly with economic take-off, which occurred about that time and with the retirement from office of the revolutionary generation. These rather puritan old warriors were replaced by men of a very different stripe, more ‘modern’ in the sense of wanting the country to become rich regardless of any moral decay that might accompany such a change, and wishing for the relaxation of such strictures on private behaviour as film and book censorship, prohibitions on divorce and contraception while supporting the extension of mass education to the general population. Interestingly, the book suggests that political corruption only really took off around 1980, becoming a public scandal only in the 1990s, at a time when both the Catholic Church and the State became objects of general public opprobrium in Ireland for the first time.

It could be argued that corruption literally followed the money; in the early years, there was less corruption because there was little to steal, and it increased as the country slowly became more prosperous. Alternatively, it could be argued that corruption became more fashionable as the culture became less puritan and pious. Certainly, the old men looked on their own successors with some distrust. Paddy Smith, an IRA veteran from Cavan and a Fianna Fáil government minister, remarked of the mohair-suited young men symbolised by Charles Haughey, ‘there are worse ways of entering politics than with a rope around your neck’. Gerry Boland, another old IRA gunman, actively despised Haughey and the other young men: ‘ some of the young men make me actually sick and disgusted. And I feel inclined to kick myself for having helped to build up an organisation to be taken over by these chancers’. He also predicted famously at the same time that Haughey would drag the Fianna Fáil party into corruption and ignominy. However, it can be argued convincingly that de Valera, Lemass and the rest of the veterans did build up a political machine which virtually invited self-enriching behaviour, whether out of naiveté, insouciance or, as I strongly suspect, out of a pretty hard-headed conviction that if the country were to get rich it would also have to have crooks.

Among much else, Byrne has an interesting discussion of Irish libel laws. Notoriously, these laws have systematically threatened pro bono publico free speech in the country and have been used to protect the reputations of people who deserve no good reputation. As Irish corrupt behaviour increased in the 1980s, comments about it in the public press did not accelerate but remained at a low level until the 1990s, when improper behaviour by many public figures simply became common knowledge and could no longer be ignored by the public press or merely whispered about in pubs. Quite apart from legal considerations, elite control over the media meant that journalists could be threatened or simply refused employment in the country. In the early 1970s, Joe MacAnthony, a journalist, ran an exposé on the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, a long-running sweep which had made millions for its promoters from the 1930s through to the 1960s with tickets being sold illegally in Britain and America through Irish emigrant networks. Only a small proportion of the profits actually went to the hospitals. The rest illegally enriched a small group of people mainly associated with the Fine Gael party. MacAnthony was effectively unemployable in Irish journalism and was forced to emigrate to Canada; he was given an offer he could not refuse.

There were many other similar cases which went unreported for obvious reasons. Ireland’s small size in itself encouraged the suppression of free speech through the passive consent or even explicitly expressed will of the people; Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority certainly prospered in Ireland for a long time, and is very certainly not dead yet. Byrne writes:

One of the most striking features of Irish corruption, as revealed by Tribunal inquiries in the 1990s, is that illegal activities were often closely interrelated because of elaborate networks of corrupt exchange. In other words, corruption operated within a system rather than the mere aggregation of isolated illegal acts. It had become a market, which, as in the case of every functioning market, has developed internal rules governed by the laws of supply and demand.

There was a limited appreciation [in Ireland] of the corrosive effects of clientelism and patronage. Political will failed to tackle corruption and a self-interested definition of national interest and impunity from consequences for impropriety characterised Irish political culture. The role of clientelism and patronage was understood from within a narrow interpretation of the terms involved.1

She argues that the exercise of corruption is anti-democratic because it seeks to give unfair and commonly illegal advantages to a favoured few over the heads of the general population. In this she is quite right, but such disadvantaging is often consented to by the electorate. Known crooks are commonly regarded as local patriots and protectors of the local interest against the intentions of ‘those people in Dublin’ or even ‘those people’ in Brussels or New York. The revelations of the Tribunals have severely damaged public trust in Irish government and its leaders. The slippage since 2008 is catastrophic, and Irish governments and politically powerful public figures had better look to themselves and their public image. The old protections of a cautious media, a timid academia and the libel laws have weakened or even disappeared.

However, old corruption is not dead in Ireland and it has staunch supporters. Everybody is against corruption unless it is the practice of ‘one of our own’. ‘One of our own’ is invariably the local hero who gets one up on those folk in Dublin. Irish political history is replete with these local heroes, the prototype again being Charles Haughey, who proctored ‘deals’ for north side and central Dublin, giving to the poor and politically mobilised while stealing millions from everyone else. In two powerful books, roughly contemporaneous with Byrne’s work, Fintan O’Toole documents the extraordinary mixture of greed and anti-intellectualism that wrecked the country and condemned it to an extended period of stagnation and possibly something worse.2 In 2012, Fintan O’Toole wrote in an afterword of sorts to these polemics:

Sometimes, you forget how tenuous and fragile a thing is the Irish State, how little it means to so many of its citizens. … The State is a set of institutions – the Government, the Oireachtas, the Civil Service, the law, the courts. It is also a broad but crucial sense of mutual dependence – the idea that there’s a collective self that goes beyond the narrow realms of family and locality.

To function at all, we have to make the working assumption that those institutions and that idea are part of what we are, that, however vehemently we disagree with each other about however many things, there is this common ground on which we stand.

Even when we rail against the institutions (for loyalty is not the same thing as passive obedience), we do so because we identify with them – they are ours to criticise. And even when we are angry at our fellow citizens, we recognise that what affects them affects us too, that there is such a thing as a common good.3

O’Toole goes on to point to a large minority in Irish society who have contempt for the law and for the state. There are those who regard non-compliance with the law and even downright criminality as being a form of patriotism rather than it being the exact opposite, a form of betrayal of the Irish people and its public institutions. Some, but very certainly not all, of this is Northern Irish, where the IRA myth of the alleged sell-out of the North by Dublin in 1922 is widely accepted even now among nationalists. This myth is a handy one: it excuses bad and even illegal behaviour on their part in the Republic. It would be interesting to see how many people involved in the recent wave of public scandals have northern or border backgrounds and close or distant IRA connections. Yet again, Haughey furnishes the prototype.

Malachy Mulligan suggests to Stephen Dedalus in the first chapter of Ulysses that these young men at the Forty Foot swimming hole would have to ‘Hellenise’ Ireland in the twentieth century. A century later, Ireland has indeed come to resemble Greece, but not the classical Greece the young men dreamed of, rather the modern one of tax-dodgers and bribery. Both Byrne and O’Toole suggest reforms in the form of new laws and constitutional amendments. Many of these are very good ideas indeed. However, there is one reform that suggests itself above all others to this writer and is not explicitly suggested by either author: the abolition of all libel laws with the possible exception of allegations of capital crimes such as murder, and the substitution for them of an unconditional right of public reply. As it stands at present, the law permits lawyers acting in defence of criminals to do so as is indeed their right, but also to threaten whistle-blowers acting pro bono publico with loss of livelihood and financial ruin. The law is possibly unconstitutional, as it is a direct and often-used impediment to freedom of speech. The United States has virtually no libel law, and gets along quite nicely without one. Instead of whispering in pubs, people would have the right to say openly what they thought of anyone else, and the other the unfettered right to answer back. Secrecy is the real bane of Irish public life, and corruption feeds off an apparently widely accepted culture of furtiveness. ‘Mind You, I’ve Said Nothing,’ is still an unofficial national motto.

TG

Notes

1Elaine A. Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland: A Crooked Harp? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp.237–8.

2Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools (London: Faber and Faber, 2009); O’Toole, Enough is Enough; How to Build a New Republic (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

3Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 7 August 2012.