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 Tuesday November 20, 2007 17:33 by Michael Nugent
 Has Fianna Fail made scandals acceptable? This video highlights just fifty of the many Fianna Fail scandals that have hit the headlines since Bertie Ahern became Party Leader in December 1994. This sheer volume of continuous scandals - some serious, some more trivial - has now become almost helpful to Fianna Fail, because we have now become so desensitised to scandals that we just accept them as the normal state of affairs. For example, any one of the scandals in the video, on their own, would have had much more impact on the public if it was not lost among a sea of other scandals, with the more serious ones being given as much or as little emphasis as the more trivial ones. This raises a number of important questions if we are to have a functioning democracy. Is it possible, in a strategic way, to focus public attention on the need for integrity in politics? I am not talking about ideological or policy or party differences here, but about integrity in the practice of politics and in public life generally. Do we have to wait for some spectacularly, insanely outrageous scandal before the public respond? Or will one of the run-of-the-mill scandals, for no particular reason, just happen to become the straw that breaks the camel's back? Or are we are prepared to just let things continue as they are, with the added bonus of paying the highest political salaries in the democratic world to reward this behaviour? . |
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