It seems to me that three issues currently dominate the political scene: Will the Celtic Tiger survive? How can its benefits be more evenly distributed? And, an ethical issue: to what extent has financial misbehaviour corrupted our society and its political system?
In the light of recent events, this may be a good moment to reflect on the last of these three concerns, returning to a subject upon which I have written here more than once.
There are really four distinct ethical issues, all of which have become jumbled together in the public mind.
The first is the issue of taxpayers evading their liabilities and the role financial institutions may have been playing in facilitating them - as well as the question of the steps politicians may take to ensure future evenhanded enforcement of the tax laws.
The second is the relationship between political parties and businesses which may have contributed to their funds.
The third is corruption in local authorities arising from the implementation of the planning laws. And the fourth is that of national politicians receiving personal payments from business interests and the links, if any, between such payments and decisions to be taken by these politicians. A subset of this is the case of politicians whose private business arrangements may leave them financially dependent on a particular business interest.
The widespread and deep malaise in relation to ethical issues arises from the fact that problems under these headings have come to public attention more or less simultaneously, creating an impression of a general collapse in ethical standards. Tax evasion is, of course, not a new problem, nor is it peculiar to Ireland: like other European countries we have always had a black economy - ranging from large-scale non-disclosure of incomes by wealthy self-employed people to the more forgivable case of women doing poorly paid part-time work who have feared complicating their husbands' tax returns by declaring their small additional incomes.
Why has our moral climate been so tolerant of tax evasion by well-off people? One factor has certainly been the fact that when the State was founded half of those at work here were selfemployed or employers. Happily, recent scandals arising from failures of tax enforcement may now effect a radical shift in attitudes towards payment of tax - on the part of both the electorate and the tax authorities and financial institutions.
As for the financing of political parties, a major reform has already been effected by recent ethics legislation - and has recently been largely copied in Britain by the Neill Report. The dependence of political parties on private funding, the bulk of which eventually came from business, was potentially dangerous. I recall that when I became leader of my party my predecessor, Liam Cosgrave, advised me to be alert to possible rogue contributions from people who might wish to influence government policy in their favour - although I have to say that in my experience almost all business contributions came without strings and were clearly well-motivated rather than given in expectation of some advantage. Nevertheless, the system carried the risk of subtly biasing government policy in a general way in favour of business. And it also carried the danger that a party considered to be open to corrupt influence might attract contributions designed to distort policy in favour of the donor. Accordingly, I was glad seven years ago when a proposal of mine to replace business funding by State funding was accepted and published as a policy statement by Fine Gael. Legislation along these lines was implemented by Labour, in government with Fianna Fail.
What worried me particularly throughout my career was the danger of Irish politics becoming infected with personal financial corruption. We had been protected from this danger by the idealism and unselfish commitment of our revolutionary leaders of both traditions, who throughout 35 post-revolutionary years continued to lead our political system without any thought of material gain. But by the time I began to think of moving towards a political career in the mid-1960s that first generation of leadership was on the way out, and I was not convinced that all of my approximate contemporaries who had entered politics since 1957 shared the singlemindedly unselfish motivation of those they were starting to replace.
I would not suggest that these political entrants were motivated solely by material interests or that they saw politics simply as a means of enriching themselves. To those of us in all political parties who had been brought up in the austere tradition of public service that had marked the leadership of the State in its early decades the attitudes and activities of some of our contemporaries gave grounds for concern. Our worries were given cogent expression by George Colley when he spoke out about low standards in high places.
The problem was that no proof of malpractice was available, and at that time there was no tradition of investigative journalism. Those, like George Colley and later Des O'Malley, who shared these concerns with many in other parties were thus vulnerable to attack when they gave voice to their fears.
Cleverly, their stance was denigrated by jeering accusations of "taking the high moral ground" - a stand that might have been considered a good and honourable one but which, with the thoughtless co-operation of some journalists, was made to sound like a very nasty kind of behaviour indeed.
Good and evil were successfully stood on their heads, and for many years it seemed to many of us in all parties that the battle to preserve integrity in politics might be lost.
Indeed, by the late 1970s the real, but never spoken, dividing line had come to be that between the great majority in all parties who shared a deep concern about these sinister developments, and the rest, who did not. Only a small minority of these were directly involved in lining their pockets at public expense, but unhappily there were quite a few who were content to see and hear no evil. Out of fear or ambition or a misplaced sense of party loyalty, they closed their minds to signs of wrongdoing.
In parallel with these developments at national level, many of us were aware of - but again could find no proof of - wrongdoing in the Dublin area in the operation of planning laws initiated in 1963. Some of us were also distressed by the way a police investigation into planning corruption ran into the ground six or seven years ago.
Now all these misdeeds are coming home to roost simultaneously. And, disturbingly, we have started to read reports that people "close to the Government" are concerned that the investigations are "going too far" and damaging public confidence.
Mr Justice Flood has found it necessary to speak of people and "entities" who "have been less than wholehearted in their cooperation" with his tribunal. It needs to be firmly asserted that it is not the investigations that are damaging public confidence but rather the misdeeds that are the subject of these investigations.
It may be that the scale of the wrongdoing now likely to be exposed will shock public opinion even more deeply than it has been disturbed by what is already known or suspected. If that be the case, so be it. We must endure whatever shocks may lie ahead. For politics must be purged once and for all of the canker that has been rotting it for several decades. We must get back to the point where what divides our political parties are differences of policy, not perceptions of different levels of probity.
There is no price too high to pay for a political system in which all the elements are known to be equally free from imputations of dishonesty and corruption.