Votes vital to two communities concerned were taken by a couple of authorities this week. In Galway, the Corporation passed a by-law outlawing drinking in the street after it had asked the public to respond to a submission requesting that particular measure from the Garda Siochana. Nobody did. That same day, Fingal County Council voted to rezone Phoenix Park racecourse for the construction of a vast estate of houses and flats which will be more populous than many Irish towns; and a local councillor, Tom Morrissey (PD), reported that even though the dogs in the street knew the 100-acre site was being proposed for residential housing, he had received not a single objection.
And even as yet another scandal was breaking over the heads of the PAYE population, a scandal for which they will probably pay in good and hearty measure, the electorate in Cork was preparing to vote for the same predictable parties which had presided over the succession of scandals of the past decade - so many, indeed, that remembering them is like reciting the names of Hapsburg principalities in which brigandage was a primary industry. Greencore, Telecom, the beef industry, the rezoning affair, Wallachia, Moldavia, Herzogovina. But at least those interesting Hapsburgian districts were enlivened by the odd assassination of government officials. Here we get no assassinations, just brigandage.
No complaints
Here is the perplexing feature of this brigandage. The electorate does not complain about these swarthy gentlemen who repeatedly and unfailingly scramble down from the rocks and waylay them on the mountain pass, waving cutlasses and relieving them of their purses.
Far from complaining, the victims of the footpads on occasion even elect the brigands as head constables. And of course, when the head constables are unable to halt the brigandage, they call in their friends the lawyers, not to throw brigands and head constables into jail - for that never happens - but to investigate what everyone already knows, and then to come up with a report.
The cycle goes on, without complaint. Silence is the accompanying leitmotiv of this drama; complete and utter silence. Silence of the kind which Galway Corporation received to its proposed ban on drinking in public places; silence of the kind about Phoenix Park, referred to by Tom Morrissey. For we have a culture which inhibits public and constructive discussion and yet encourages private whinging - not merely at a political level, but even on these pages, where orthodoxy is buttressed so often by letter-writers who declare that any opinion not their own is offensive and unacceptable and, why, very possibly racist.
Political consensus
Mute conformism, fearful of speaking its mind and publicly accepting of circumstance, but then mumbling sulkily behind hands - that is the engine behind our political consensus. All that is ever required is for the political establishment to take the lead on something - EEC membership, EMU or the legalisation of condoms - and the populace rows in behind, obedient as galley-slaves.
In Germany we have seen entirely new brand politics emerge with the new coalition government. In Britain, there have been waves of political disturbance over the past 25 years, unleashing three new political forces: Thatcherism, the SDPs, and Blairism.
In Ireland the best we have managed is New Old Tribunalism, in which every political delinquency is passed over (along with vast sums of money) to the legal profession to sort out.
In this atmosphere of either inertia or timidity, how can councillors make their minds up about anything? How is possible for public representatives or public officials to gauge opinion - if, that is, there is such a thing at all? How is it possible for coherent policy to be created and then maintained if there is silence when policy is formulated, silence when it is implemented, and silence when it is violated?
Nothing seems to make much difference to that yeti of Irish life, public opinion - supposedly vast, yet no-one ever sees it, though there are loud grumblings at night from what are believed to be yeti hostelries; and just occasionally, there is a local footprint when something particularly vile is done. But then the footprint vanishes with a new snowfall of scandal, and the villagers forget it was ever there.
Who remembers?
Who now remembers the cover-ups of clerical childabuse? Who remembers the Talbot affair? Who remembers the attempted nationalisation of the entire archipelago of the Blaskets, save that island then owned by the then Taoiseach? Who remembers the Government bailing out AIB from its disastrous venture into assurance?
Who remembers the name of the mountainous province between Hungary and Romania where visiting officials vanished and wolves were seen at dawn licking their lips?
And where is the anger over this? Where are the indignant taxpayers who are paying for all this? Where is the rule of law, exercised in an exemplary fashion over the wretched junkie who is now doing six years for stealing a handbag in a cafe, but so strangely inert when it comes to dealing with the mighty, the powerful? And where is the electoral reaction to the dismal cavalcade of wrong-doing, subterfuge, illegality? We have invented and perfected a new form of democracy, the envy of politicians everywhere: the politics of voluntary public anaesthesia.