A remarkable aspect of the Sheedy case is that its culmination in the resignations of leading members of the judiciary and a close shave for the Government was the result of an accidental sighting of Philip Sheedy by someone who thought he should still be in jail. It should raise the shocking possibility that this kind of thing is going on all the time. But what is really shocking about this case is not so much the circumstances of it, or the behaviour of the judges and politicians concerned, but the extent of the dishonesty with which the facts have been received.
The thrust of this reception in the media and political arenas suggests that there is something unusually horrifying about these facts, when anyone who has lived in this State for any length of time knows that this kind of thing is what makes Irish life go tick and tock.
One of the dangers of all the recent talk about political purity, transparency, accountability and so forth, is that innocent people are wont to take it seriously. As a result, some citizens are currently going around like the character at the end of an English drawing-room farce, who, while all around him are fornicating on every available horizontal surface, is shaking his head and wondering how long all this has been going on. We seem to imagine that saying things is the same as changing them. We tend to believe that because we keep saying "clientilism" has no place in a modern society, those in power will be reluctant to practise it. The opposite is the case: the fact that there exists a public belief that clientilism is defunct simply ensures that there is more honey in the pot for those who do not take political rhetoric too literally. Also, the pretence that certain things are above politics is deeply tedious to anyone who has been paying even cursory attention. Every- thing in Irish society eventually traces back to politics. Every member of every party in Ireland understands that the purpose of power is to do right by your friends.
There is hardly a public institution in Ireland which is not run on the basis of graft and favour. All parties work this culture, and those who condemn it most, work it better than the others. All judges are political appointees. A vastly disproportionate number of TDs are lawyers, suggesting that lawyers tend, more than most professions, to hitch their stars to particular parties with a view to improving their chances of advancement. Are judges appointed by politicians thereafter to forget the allegiances which made possible their elevation to the bench? I don't think so.
This culture is so blatant that it is almost pointless adopting a moralistic attitude to it. What we call clientilism is one of the last hangovers of traditional society, and the present debates, in seeking to focus on a moral dimension, tend to miss the point. These are no more issues of morality than the wearing of odd socks. This controversy is just another symptom of our present halfway stage between country and city.
Rural and village life do not require laws and institutions in the way urban society demands them. The culture of the traditional community carried the weight of people's need for structure, order and restraint. Common knowledge of the individual and his/her family, accumulated over generations, enabled these needs to be met. It came down to each family to sort out its wrongdoers, and a failure to do so resulted in the family itself being sanctioned.
This had both bright and dark sides, but on balance it tended to work, at least in preserving collective life. In an urban society, where people do not know their neighbours, these mechanisms can no longer operate, which is why we have in recent decades developed such an obsession with creating concrete rights and written commitments. A legalistic culture, too, has merits and inadequacies. There is a theoretical aspiration towards equality, for example, which in practice can lack discretion or understanding of complex human issues.
In a society with its roots in the most inequitable condition of all - that of colonisation - the types of behaviour currently being held up to public scrutiny were in the first place no more than necessary adjustments to enable those at the bottom overcome the worst aspects of marginalisation.
This is the condition in which Fianna Fail established its roots. More often than not, the occasional judicious (if not always judicial) intervention on behalf of a lowly citizen was no more than a minor attempt to redress the intrinsic imbalances of the society. Often, the only chance those on the wrong side of the tracks had of a fair shake was through the intervention of elected representatives or other elders of the community. Attempts to kill the old culture have not resulted in a more decent society. The newly-created legalistic culture has at least as many flaws as the old culture of clientilism, and is more immune to human appeal.
Nobody knows this better than those in charge of the system. These recent manifestations of the old culture at-work-as-a-virus in the new are interesting in that they have occurred not in the heartlands of traditionalism but at the centre of our modern society. The pictures of ashen-faced former judges, issuing statements from their doorsteps or walking their dogs in the park, came not from Dowra or Granard, but from the heart of Dublin Four.
In a sense, then, the Sheedy case amounts to an admission from the heart of the system that the system itself lacks something which can be supplied only by reference to the old culture being discarded.
What if what we call clientilism might simply be characterised as the phenomenon of human intervention to make our systems of justice, economics or whatever more amenable to values of mercy, compassion and fellow-feeling? There can surely be nothing wrong with public administration having a heart and a soul, except where it may create a potential for inequality of treatment, for example if the dominance of one political party, or a particular class across various parties, were to make the extra-curricular benefits of the system accessible to some more than others.
The answer, however, may reside not in attempting to destroy the indestructible, but in making the culture of clientilism more egalitarian. Perhaps if we were to create a political system in which the spoils of office might be shared on a more equal basis by all parties and their followers, we might be able to live with what we have been unable to eliminate.
Instead of all this pretence about accountability, a term in government might be awarded like one of those supermarket competition prizes where the winner is given a trolley and a set period in which to take as many items as possible from the shelves. What this might lack in modernity it would make up for in truthfulness.