Alright Jack?

As I write, Dublin traffic is stalled from Donnybrook to Kimmage. The funeral of Jack Lynch is slowly making its way westwards to where his remains will stay the night before travelling to Cork where, I have no doubt, he will be waked and buried like a king.

Many Hot Press readers will have difficulty remembering who he was. His era in government predates many of their years of birth. So there may be some puzzlement as to why he seems so fondly remembered by so many.

It is, perhaps, a melancholy and wistful remembrance, a nostalgia for the time when the leader of the country smoked a pipe, spoke softly and modestly despite his great fame as a sportsman, didn't shop in Paris for his shirts, insisted they call him Jack when he visited Cork's sporting haunts, and generally seemed quiet and unassuming.

A decent man, say many who knew him, an all-round good egg. And an uncommonly gifted sportsman - winner of five hurling and one football All-Ireland medals, and the only person to win six in-a-row.

These Corinthian and pastoral origins probably seem like a haven of peace, honour and decency to angst-ridden pre-Millennials. And who can blame them?

The time between then and now has seen the development of a Tammany Hall culture in politics and business in this country, a level of corruption that permeates all levels and strata of society, and (even still) incomprehensible degrees of self-deception and hypocrisy.

Lynch is now portrayed as before and beyond all that. I wouldn't know. Mind you, I think that the bullish corruption was already in the system when he came to power, for example in Fianna Fail's TACA fund-raising activities, and in the property speculators who destroyed so much of Dublin.

And Lynch, the Taoiseach who carried his party to the greatest landslide victory in the history of the state in 1977, presided over the ensuing financial fiasco when many taxes were reduced or abolished, a policy that directly led to the cutbacks and catastrophes of the 1980s.

But as they say in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the truth and the myth are in conflict, print the myth. In truth, Lynch made mistakes, squandered the opportunity to modernise the State and bring in socially progressive policies when he had his huge majority. And, avuncular and all as he was, he was tough.

But there's no way that he doesn't seem like a saint in the late 1990s, is there? In the time of Charvet shirts, huge restaurant expenses and off-shore accounts, Lynch bows out as a reminder that it doesn't have to be like that. For those of us too young to remember a time when we weren't running tribunals to root out yet more levels of corruption, it seems an enchanting thought.

* * *

Of course, Lynch's funeral wasn't the only thing to bring Dublin to a standstill on Thursday 21st: 10,000 nurses lent a hand as well, demonstrating their determination to stand firm in their strike action.

One sympathises with them. Their work is . . . well, would you do it? And clearly they are of one mind regarding their core demands. But there is another side that isn't heard so well, that they have been offered a far greater raise in pay than anyone else, and that concession of their claim would set off a ruinous round of pay claims in the public sector (a process that may already be under way).

The fact that a bunch of rich people were tax-dodging and that the State has loads of money is quoted as justification for the claim, but is a red herring.

The nurses' representatives have consistently dodged the question of relativity in the public sector. There is an accepted relationship between the salaries of nurses, Gardam, teachers, and so on. If one gets a rise, the others automatically get it too.

So, do the nurses want the relativity changed? If they do, they should say so. They would have a better chance of achieving their wider aims regarding pay and conditions. It is likely that the Labour Court arbitrator was influenced towards the existing set of proposals by the certainty of knock-on claims that would cost billions.

Given the increasingly technical nature of their work, and the fact that a nurse is no longer trained on the apprenticeship model, but along the same lines as a teacher, there is a compelling case for a new set of relativities.

But the nurses' negotiators should be honest enough to say so. If they were, it would be easier to accede, but they don't want to - they know full well that such a declaration would elicit the hostility of other professional unions whom they need to keep on their side for the present.

But let's be clear - the shenanigans being uncovered by the Moriarty and Flood tribunals and by the DIRT inquiry mean that the four-be-twos are up in arms and rightly so. At the time of writing, the latest is John Ellis, the TD who had a debt of a quarter of a million written off.

Local farmers are not impressed.

***

But we're changing now, aren't we? Writing in the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole quoted an individual who had worked in the banking system and who maintained that the decline in moral standards in that sector could be correlated with the decline in the dominance of Protestants.

What a fascinating idea, and certainly sustainable as an argument.

It fits with what one sees all around - our transformation from a southern European or Mediterranean (ie Catholic) people to a northern European (or Protestant) people. You can see it everywhere. Except in the North, but that's another story.

But there's a huge risk in this. Protestantism is a modern phenomenon. It supplanted Catholicism, which is medieval or pre-modern. But we are now a post-modern society, with which Protestantism is incompatible. Look at the North, for example!

So, where the hell are we going? (Assuming that we can identify who we are in the first place!) Well, maybe we're in the dock with Charles Haughey, a man whose career espoused the Catholic idea that saying you're sorry absolved everything. Or maybe we're out there with the sixth billion human, born last week. As usual, it looks like we're not sure - buying the whole suite when all we need is a cushion.

Same as it ever was . . .

The Hog