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Thursday, May 20, 2010
Corruption has been widespread in this country
BY TP O’MAHONY
IN a rights-conscious age where movements like feminism have made us all conscious of equality issues, it is easy to forget how recent are the gains made against hereditary privilege, elitism and the class-ridden structures flowing from the divine rights of kings.
The age of the nobles and the peasants is of more recent vintage than we think, and still splutters on moribund but not yet dead, as we have seen in the moves to resist reform of the House of Lords in Britain.
Whether a new government over there will push through those reforms remains to be seen.
We talk of the Copernican Revolution and the Enlightenment and of the far-reaching changes wrought by these. And yes, these changes did occur, and account in part for the revolutionary vision of Wolfe Tone.
To understand the slow and painful change into a more enlightened age, it helps to look at the great documents of history, the declarations and manifestos and charters made by visionaries and reformers down through the centuries.
From the Magna Carta of 1251 to statements published during the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia in 1989, history has turned on such documents. In between there were Luther’s 95 theses in 1517 – launching the Reformation – the declaration of rights of the French Revolution in 1789, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Then there were the documents which led to upheavals in the New World, most notably the American Revolution of 1775-1778. The influence of the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and the ideologies of the French Revolution, can be traced all the way down in this country to the 1916 Proclamation and the Declaration of Independence issued by the First Dáil in 1919, along with the Democratic Programme of that Dáil.
The influence of a self-educated Englishman named Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is discernible throughout all of this. Paine contributed enormously through his writings to the movement for independence in America, where he arrived from England in 1774.
Paine was a superb propagandist and was a powerful disseminator of influential ideas such as natural rights, equality, majority rule and the importance of a written constitution. He said his country was the world and his religion was to do good.
His outspoken republicanism was expressed in his book, Rights of Man (1791).
If the House of Windsor is ever scrapped across the water to make way for a republic, Tom Paine will be due a lot of credit.
Apart from the Easter Rising Proclamation and the documents of the First Dáil, our corpus of historical documents also includes the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
These are significant signposts along the path to freedom, independence and parity of esteem. They are also significant reminders in 2010 of the extent to which this nation has witnessed a betrayal of its founding ideals.
Corruption has been widespread in this country, especially since the Haughey era. Power has been abused to favour the wealthy. Glaring inequalities and iniquities characterise Irish society in the 21st century.
Shameful practices in the exploitation of land and property for the personal gain of a few have been condoned by a government obsessed with the retention of power above all else.
One result of all of this has been a worrying loss of trust not just in political parties but in politics itself and its capacity for genuine reform in the interests of all sectors of society.
We need a new Tom Paine. We need a new Republic. An Irish Rights of Man presaging a Second Republic remains to be written.
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