Last Wednesday, as Mark O'Shaughnessy and Brian Murray were entering a smoke-filled, disused factory in Bray, another kind of noxious fumes was choking up the public realm. The Revenue Commissioners' latest list of high-level tax defaulters included a current TD, Michael Lowry, who settled for €1.45 million and Eddie Bohan, a senator until this year, who coughed up €2 million.
Meanwhile, in Limerick, Michael Collins, a TD until the last election, was going on trial for obtaining a tax clearance certificate even though he had an undeclared bank account operated in the names of Ann and Joseph Collins, with an address in Croydon in Surrey. And, later that day, the Dáil would express its continuing confidence in a Taoiseach who has admitted receiving the equivalent of €300,000 in donations for his personal use.
Last year, Mark O'Shaughnessy, Brian Murray and their colleagues in Bray fire station got an average of €22,000 before tax each for putting their lives on the line - less than one twelfth of what Bertie Ahern got in dig-outs, whip-arounds and bundles of cash. The €22,000 includes a payment of €40 for the first hour of every fire they attended and €20 for every subsequent hour. When these two men went in to the burning building from which their colleagues would later pull their lifeless bodies, they were doing it for €40.
Or, rather, they were doing it for something else: a little money plus a lot of pride. They were doing it because of a sometimes intangible but always crucial notion - public service. And, though they were fine, brave men and truly honourable members of their community, they were fools. They believed in something that has been rendered ridiculous by their supposed betters.
Public service means doing more than your job. It's the unarmed garda who walks up to a car full of armed robbers. It's the nurse who holds the hand of a dying old man. It's the teacher who infuses the troubled kid with self-belief and self-respect.
It's the postmistress who has a few kind words for the lonely farmer who comes into the village only on pension day. It's the welfare officer who listens patiently as the distraught woman with broken English tries to tell her story. It's the civil servant who tries to come up with solutions rather than explaining why things can't be done. It's the cleaner who pays attention to the nooks and crannies. It's the fireman who goes into the smoke-filled room.
There's not enough of it and there's about to be a lot less. When politicians who make the laws evade them, when those who impose taxes refuse to pay them, when a leader tells us that basic standards don't apply to him, public service becomes a notion for the naive and the gullible. What's happening in Irish public life matters because it contaminates the groundwater of a democratic society. Why should those employed by the State do more than their jobs when those who ultimately employ them do less than theirs?
The minimum requirements for holding public office are that you uphold the laws you pass and don't allow yourself to be put under private obligations. Those requirements have now been removed. Virtually the entire Cabinet has endorsed Bertie Ahern's behaviour, thus stating, effectively, that the new standard is that we have no standards at all. The only legislative response to Ahern's behaviour has been a proposal from Brian Cowen to amend the ethics legislation, not to outlaw personal donations from "friends", but to legalise them.
The most accurate summary of the new regime was contained in a piece by Ralph Reigel in the Sunday Independent: "Bernie was proud of his role as one of Ireland's great characters. A few euro slipped into his hand wasn't charity - it was merely a proper and fitting recognition of his status as the 'People's Champion' and street raconteur." He was writing about the late Cork councillor and character Bernie Murphy, but change the "n" in Bernie to a "t" and you have a perfect statement of where we're at. It is fit and proper to slip a few euro into the hands of the People's Champion and witness-box raconteur.
The clock has been turned right back to the Haughey era. All the legislation passed to clean up Irish politics has become a joke. The Ethics in Public Office Act was exposed as a sham when the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) issued a one-line statement to say that it had no grounds on which the investigate the payments to the Taoiseach. The Freedom of Information Act has been gelded.
The Electoral Act's supposed controls on party donations have been so ineffective that SIPO's David Waddell recently pointed out that parties are merely "soliciting donations below the disclosure thresholds", so that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the PDs managed not to have a single disclosable donation in the year before the general election.
So we should mourn Mark O'Shaughnessy and Brian Murray by all means, but mourn, too, that they died for a State whose official values now mock the ideals for which they died.