I was asked last week to talk to a conference in Ennis organised by the redoubtable Father Harry Bohan and to address the question of whether power erodes ethics. Five words sprang to mind - Charles Haughey, States of Fear - summing up the obvious answer to that question in the realms of State and church. But that answer is so obvious that I began to think it must be just a little too pat. Perhaps, if we're ever going to move beyond the present despair about the state of public morality in Ireland, we need to reflect, not just on the effects of unaccountable authority but also on those of unrelieved impotence.
No one in Ireland (or anywhere else in this vale of tears) could doubt the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have seen the corrupting influence of power in political life, in the business world, and, most appallingly, in the treatment of children within institutions and families. It is the daily bread of the tribunals and inquiries that fill the newspapers and the airwaves, and of the daily dread that will fill our hearts when the commission on child abuse begins next year.
But it is also true that powerlessness corrupts and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Without the power to choose, people cannot choose to do good. Without the ability to make decisions, there can be no decision to act morally. Powerlessness corrupts by eroding the sense of personal responsibility that is central to ethical conduct.
We know, too, that the corruption that results from power, and the corruption that results from powerlessness, often become almost indistinguishable. People who feel powerless sometimes respond by abusing whatever power they can manage to seize. Victims sometimes become a great moral force, driven by a determination that no one should suffer as they have done.
But they sometimes become victimisers, taking out the rage and humiliation they have been made to feel on anyone who comes within reach.
IN contemporary Ireland, we know all about the way the corruption of powerlessness can become the abuse of absolute power. The most obvious and extreme example is the IRA, which transmuted a communal sense of being powerless into an attitude of God-like power, so that an uneducated youth who would find it hard to exercise authority as a traffic warden could walk into a fish shop with a bomb, assuming the right to annihilate the lives of people he had never met. We can think, too, of the largely silent but immensely corrosive impact of domestic violence. James Connolly's description of the wife of an exploited worker as "the slave of a slave" echoes through countless homes. When we do begin to get to grips with the full story of institutional child abuse in churchrun industrial schools and orphanages, what we will certainly hear will be a horrendous story of the corrupting effects of having total power over children. But it will also be a story about the abusers themselves and the way they were formed in a culture of absolute obedience and institutionalised in a rigid hierarchy of authority and submission. Almost certainly, what we will find is that their appalling abuse of power was itself a response to the lack of freedom in the rest of their lives. The point is this: we can't fall back on the notion that corruption began only when we became an open society in which individuals acquired the power of education and prosperity. Mired as we are in scandals and confused as we often are by the relentless barrage of choices in our new world, it is very tempting to invent a simpler, nicer past in which we all behaved morally because we had no power to do otherwise. We can fondly imagine that the power of prosperity has corrupted us and that the powerlessness of poverty was somehow more innocent. This is a dangerous lie. It's a lie because no one can properly call a society in which vulnerable children were treated as they were, or in which women were treated with such contempt, a moral one. And it's dangerous because it feeds a divide between "conservative" and "liberal" Ireland that has made it almost impossible for us to talk about morality at all.
The truth is that when the old Ireland was apparently more moral, it was the morality of powerlessness. If we were good, it was not because of choice but because of restraint. In public life, nationalism and the ideals of building a nation created a powerful constraint on naked self-interest. In private life, religion and the fear of damnation had the same effect. But as nationalism and Catholicism relaxed their grip on society, these constraints became gradually weaker.
What we found was that we did not have, in large sections of public and business life, the moral sensibility that comes from the habit of making free and responsible choices. We had a morality of powerlessness, imposed from above and evaded by those who had the power to do so.
WE have to be clear about the sequence of the changes that led to our current condition of prosperity without a strong sense of moral purpose. It is not that prosperity eroded ethics, but that the erosion of ethics determined the nature of the prosperity.
Because Irish society began the process of adjusting to the global economy at a time when its public morality was collapsing, those who had power felt free to shirk the burden of that painful adjustment and to stash their moral obligations in secret offshore accounts. That is why we have a prosperity that eludes those who suffered most in its creation - the children whose health and education was damaged by cutbacks, the communities whose development was blighted by unemployment.
What we need now is a morality of power, an ethical system that is rooted in a recognition that people in a modern democracy have the power to make choices. For that to happen, the church has to give up on the idea that morality can be enforced by law, and the State has to be run by people who have, in the broadest sense, a sense of spiritual mission.
We have to get beyond the sterile arguments about church and State and begin to talk about the areas where politics and spirituality shade into each other, infusing a sense of public obligation into the private world of spirituality and a sense of private mission into the public world of politics. Fintan O'Toole can be contacted at fotoole@irish-times.ie
