Political corruption in Ireland 1922–2010: A crooked harp?

By Elaine Byrne

This book empirically maps the decline in standards since the inauguration of Irish independence in 1922, to the loss of Irish economic sovereignty in 2010. It argues that the definition of corruption is an evolving one. As the nature of the state changes, so too does the type of corruption.

New evidence is presented on the early institutional development of the state. Irish public life was motivated by an ethos which rejected patronage. Original research provides fresh insights into how the policies of economic protectionalism and discretionary decision making led to eight Tribunal inquires.

The emergence of state capture within political decision making is examined by analysing political favouritism towards the beef industry. The degree to which unorthodox links between political donations impacted on policy choices which exacerbated the depth of Ireland’s economic collapse is considered.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish politics, corruption theory, governance, public policy and political financing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847798022

Elaine Byrne

Elaine Byrne is an adjunct lecturer in Irish Politics at Trinity College Dublin

Book preview

1

Introduction

Ireland’s national emblem, the harp, has since medieval times, resonated as an official symbol for Irish nationhood. Today, this immediately recognisable icon is found in the seals of the President, Taoiseach, naval flags, on courthouses and Irish embassies. It appears on the back of Irish coins, on postage stamps and pints of Guinness. This distinctive Irish musical instrument has an additional significance within political folklore. It has become symbolic of the adage that in order to get anything done in Ireland, it is necessary to pull strings. The implication, therefore, is that concepts of meritocracy and legitimate entitlement are superseded by notions of special advantage through unorthodox and clandestine influence.

This is a study of the history of corruption in Ireland which, by inference, reveals a hidden chronicle of Irish politics. This book will outline specific corruption incidents since the foundation of the state to determine if this proverb of a corrupted harp has some resonance or if the eloquence and exaggeration of the Irish storytelling tradition is in evidence. The purpose therefore, is to document if a decline in standards occurred since the inauguration of Irish independence in 1922 to the loss of economic sovereignty in 2010. Although the Irish public mind is perhaps convinced that corruption is a prevailing feature of political life, there has been almost no empirical investigation into the veracity of this assumption.

The main assumption underpinning this book is that contemporary corruption, and the political culture which sustains it, can best be understood by charting how the phenomenon has incrementally changed over a significant period of time, in this case over ninety years. In doing so, it seeks to reintroduce a philosophical and moral emphasis to the definition of corruption by focusing on its legal and moral keystones. The definition of corruption is an evolving one. As the nature of the state changed, so too did the type of corruption. This longitudinal inquiry provides an in-depth historical insight into the predominant trends of corruption at different stages of Ireland’s political development. A central thematic focus therefore is the relationship between different notions of loyalty and its influence on public trust. Loyalty to the political individual, the political party and the state are evaluated. It is examined whether aspects of Irish political culture incentivised and condoned certain conduct. The extent to which interpretations of the national interest, economic crises and the thirty year conflict in Northern Ireland prevented and distracted due attention are also surveyed.

This is explored through a case study methodological approach which examines representative cases of corruption within an empirical perspective. Such extensive description and contextual analysis facilitates an awareness of why corruption occurred as it did within its real-life context.¹ The selection of cases is central to this approach because it defines the limits for generalising the findings.² To that end, the selected cases were chosen because they are representative of key Irish political events since the foundation of the state and illustrate different forms of conventional political practice which best represent the characteristics and patterns of Irish corruption. The suitability of this methodology is illustrated by case studies on corruption in Africa and focused country studies in Italy and Japan.³

Incidents which have attracted significant public attention are not necessarily included, or may only be referenced in passing, because the parameters of the book do not allow for a more thorough analysis, and in many cases, are deserving of a manuscript in their own right. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive inventory of every corruption incident. As the purpose of this study is to catalogue changing behaviour, such an exercise would quickly become futile because it inevitably repeats itself. Instead, it is more constructive to identify the key turning points which demonstrate different types of corruption and why behaviour changes.

The originality of the in-depth archival evidence is complemented by the extraordinary process of self-scrutiny engaged in Ireland by political and other institutions since the 1990s. The research is primarily qualitative and interdisciplinary, and derived from political, historical, sociological, anthropological and economic data. The vast majority of the corruption cases surveyed is not identified within any aspect of the literature. Primary source material consists of previously unpublished and un-accessed material from the collections of the National Archives, National Library, National Manuscripts, UCD Archives, Linen Hall Library and the Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland. These include internal government correspondence on proposed legislation and reports, private and published correspondence, manuscripts, pamphlets, speeches and letters. Primary source material also comprises formal and informal interviews with leading political figures, members of the judiciary, senior public servants and other experts. As such, this study provides the groundwork or foundation for studies of corruption in Ireland.

Corruption has played no small part in determining the course of Irish history. The United Irishman and father of Irish Republicanism, Theobald Wolfe Tone, recognised its corrosive influence as early as the eighteenth century. In his very first political pamphlet in 1790, Wolfe Tone wrote of the ‘choice of open or concealed corruption’.⁴ The consequence of the blatant bribery by agents of the British King which procured the Act of Union, 1801, was the robbery of native Irish legislative independence until 1922. The quid pro quo of the £10,000 political donation by the diamond entrepreneur, Cecil Rhodes, to the Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1888, ultimately found expression in the settlement of the Irish question in 1920 with the retention of Irish MPs at the Northern Ireland Parliament.

The selected case studies are sourced from pivotal points in Irish history and reflect not only the changing nature of ethical behaviour but also the often-unacknowledged impact of these corruption scandals on political events. Chapter 2 examines how the deliberate policy of Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary to Ireland from 1907–16, to ‘green’ Dublin Castle through patronage contributed to the downfall of the Irish party and had a profound bearing on the development of post-independent Ireland. This set the context for the austere conditions of probity which were a defining feature of Irish politics and the civil service in the 1920s. This is explored through an examination of the £4 9s 6d restaurant bill and the character of legislation implemented in this period.

Chapter 3 reveals how the policy of economic protectionalism in the 1930s and 1940s provided the opportunity to exercise discretionary decisions to political allies in the issuing of licences, shares, leases and export quotas. The Tribunal trilogy from 1943 to 1947 contributed to the government collapse in 1944 and the removal of Fianna Fáil from power for the first time in sixteen years in 1948. The seeds of Taoiseach Seán Lemass’ New Departure economic policy of the 1950s, which opened up the Irish economy, were in part sown from his experience before the Tribunals as Minister for Industry and Commerce in the 1940s.

Chapter 4 makes the assessment that discretionary political decisions, made under the cloak of economic protectionalism, were replaced by the authorisation of planning permission in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The shortcomings of planning legislation in the 1960s and the response of the 1973–77 National Coalition government to alleged corruption, determined the framework for political culture in the subsequent thirty years.

Chapter 5 scrutinises allegations of political favouritism towards the beef industry and within the privatisation process of state sponsored bodies in the 1980s and 1990s. The consequent 1991–94 Beef Tribunal ultimately precipitated the collapse of the 1992 and 1994 coalition governments. This remarkable period was distinct from previous scandals because it marked the possibility of state capture within political decision-making.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how previous practices within the planning system, the privatisation process and the relationship between politics and business remained largely unchanged. The Tribunal trilogy which began in 1997 and which is expected to conclude in 2011, outlines how the definition of corruption evolved from a narrow interpretation of legal statutes to a greater awareness of the ethical dimensions of improper political behaviour. A consequence of this growing public appreciation of the wider understanding of political ethics, was the untimely retirement of popular Taoisigh, Charles J. Haughey and Bertie Ahern.

In previous chapters, the unorthodox link between political donations and business or personal interests became the principal cause of scandal over time. Chapter 7 details how Fianna Fáil’s financial reliance on the beef industry in the 1980s was replaced by property and construction interests in the 1990s and 2000s. This chapter explores the degree to which this dependence impacted on policy decisions which exacerbated the depth of Ireland’s economic collapse in 2008 and necessitated the subsequent intervention by the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank in 2010.

The final chapter assesses how the definition of corruption evolved in Ireland from 1922 to 2010. Apart from discretionary political decision making, which is analysed at length in the case studies, this chapter presents three variables – Irish party system, Irish political culture and Irish media – which impacted on the character of corruption exercised in Ireland.

Towards a new definition

The central thesis of this book is to challenge the conventional definition of corruption which is widely understood to be the ‘abuse of public office for private gain’. Corruption however is as much implicit as it is explicit. John Noonan’s definitive study on bribery emphasises that bribery can only be understood from a historical context and definitions depend upon culture.⁵ In other words, public and political response to scandal can readily be held hostage to an outdated understanding of ethical transgressions. The case studies will demonstrate how this is the case.

The concept of corruption has continually wrestled between an awareness of what is legally and what is morally regarded as corrupt. A legal understanding narrowly interprets the concept of corruption as obligations defined by legal statutes where the law is clearly broken. A moral concept place a greater emphasis on behaviour defined not just by legal codes, but to expectations of behaviour characterised by a broader moral compass. The word corrupt is derived from the Latin verb rumpere which means, ‘to break’. This implies that something is broken.

History has at different times placed greater weight on moral codes of conduct over legal codes of conduct and vice versa. This was the case in classical antiquity where corruption was defined in generalist terms as inequality and the loss of civic virtue, rather than as any individual political action. The ‘Pledge of the Athenian City State’ in ancient Greece reflected this sense of a broad duty to a public trust.

‘The Pledge of the Athenian City State’

We will never bring disgrace to this our city

by any act of dishonesty or cowardice,

nor ever desert our suffering comrades in the ranks;

We will ever strive for the ideals and sacred things

of the city, both alone and with many;

We will revere and obey the city’s laws

and do our best to incite to a like respect and reverence

those who are prone to annul or set them at naught;

We will unceasingly seek to quicken the sense of public duty;

That thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.⁶

For Plato, corruption was the systemic collapse of the moral vitality of an entire society and the inability to pursue justice for the common good.⁷ In the same way, the sixteenth-century Republican political thinker, Niccoló Machiavelli, regarded political corruption as the destruction of virtu, which he defined as civic loyalty.⁸ Corruption could only be prevented through creating and sustaining citizenship which facilitated loyalty to the state rather than to any individual vested interest. From this perspective, the polity is organically integrated. The individual represents the organs of the polity and the collective comprises the body of the polity. The interdependent nature is such that when individual self-interested behaviour occurs, corruption is systematic, because it is the corruption of the body politic. The self-interested private citizen is subordinate to the public-minded citizen which may explain why the ancient Greek word for private citizen is idiota, which is the origin of the contemporary word, idiot.

Irish religious teaching placed similar moral emphasis on corruption. In 1111, the Synod of the sons of Óengus, a meeting of Ireland’s bishops, priests and ecclesiastics, took place at Fiad mic Oengusso in Co. Westmeath, to make ‘certain regulations concerning public morals’.⁹ Suffice to say, the age when Ireland had Synods, or national governing councils, to determine the boundaries of public morality are no longer in existence. The unconscious solidarity of simpler societies that Plato espoused is not a practical application for contemporary society. The nineteenth-century French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, believed that there was no going back to a society where the individual was subordinated to a collective conscience.¹⁰ The dense division of labour that greeted modernity encouraged interdependence between people which precluded such communal moral harmony, if such a thing ever actually existed. This made absolute self-regulation no longer appropriate, like that envisaged by Plato and the Irish Synods.

As the nature of the state changed, so too did the shift in emphasis from the moral to the legal concept of corruption. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bore witness to a fundamental redefinition of the very meaning of the state. The growth in government functions compelled greater intervention by the state in the affairs of its citizens which in turn necessitated a further reliance on legal statutes to determine and regulate conduct.

Indeed the early struggles for democratic government were marked by widespread corruption which was then regarded as a necessary means to check the absolute power of the monarchy. Both Charles Louis de Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham, the French and British philosophers of the Enlightenment, advocated the buying and selling of political offices because it raised money for the public treasury and offered an alternative route for economic and social advancement. The twin pillars of democracy – the principles of major-itarianism and the separation of powers – were conceived from eighteenth-century corrupt practices. The first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole (1721–42), pioneered what we know today as the majority principle. This was where the ruling party of the House of Commons gained its position on the basis of majority support. Royal patronage and nepotism were used to provide appointments and favours to political allies in cooperation with the then leader of the Opposition, Lord Henry St John Viscount Bolingbroke. This transfer of monarchical control to a parliamentary system was the prologue to the modern concept of the state. The introduction of bureaucracy was a symbolic end of aristocratic and monarchical privilege and advantage. The state, and by implication public office, was no longer regarded as the private property of the King. Distinctions between public and private became more prominent as the practice of politics was transformed.

This was also the case in Ireland as the character of Irish politics dramatically altered. Irish constituencies, no longer the private property of the landlord, became the public property of its citizens from the mid nineteenth and twentieth century. The concept of the State shifted from the living embodiment of an inheritance to an impersonal legal entity. The use of public office as a private property was no longer acceptable or tolerated. Rule thus developed from a private activity to a public duty.

It was in this context that Lord John Acton, a former MP for the County Carlow constituency, wrote to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887 with the often repeated phrase: ‘I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way holders of power … Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.¹¹ Acton challenged the assumption that traditional authority figures, such as the Pope and the King, can do no wrong. He believed that a person’s sense of morality diminished as an individual’s power increased.

Traditionally, intellectual argument on ethics in Ireland has qualified as assuming that corrupt conduct is wrong, albeit qualified with cultural considerations. Although corruption is a commonly used word, it is most often misused, misunderstood and misdirected. The power of its meaning and impact has become weakened by overuse which has rendered it as a hackneyed, clichéd, and stereotyped expression. Public debate has often been reduced to blandly labelling an unethical act as corrupt. This is meaningless. The analogy of cancer is useful in this context insofar as cancer cannot be cured unless it is known what type of cancer it is. Any understanding of corruption must be accompanied by an appreciation of the different types so that a long-term strategy for its prevention can be achieved.

The critical challenge then is to diagnose and explain the distinctions within corruption. By being able to define what something is, it is possible to learn how to prevent it. This can be realised by distinguishing between moral and legal corruption; clientelism and brokerage; and the rumours and reality of corruption. In doing so, a new definitional approach to corruption will be provided.

Any attempt to define corruption has been deeply problematic because, by its nature, it is secretive and does not lend itself to overt analysis earned from empirical evidence. Human beings, by their very nature, are flawed creatures. This fragility within our value system does not cease to exist with the passing of time nor when countries become more modern. Instead, our limitations grow to become more nuanced and intricate as our lives become more complicated. The ethical dimension of wrongdoing also hinders objective analyses because any such scrutiny is suggestive of a judgmental and self-righteous undertone. This is especially the case when any historical analysis of corruption is attempted. The well-known opening line of L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ is a frequently cited charge when any retrospective examination of behaviour is undertaken. This justifiably recognises that the political culture and context of the period under scrutiny deters a value neutral contemporaneous appraisal.

What is corrupt today may be the kernel of tomorrow’s norms and vice-versa. What is unethical in one culture may be socially acceptable in another. Political culture, defined as the inherited set of beliefs, attitudes, opinions and norms held by a population, ultimately decides what types of political conduct is considered acceptable. As the set of values within which a system operates, political culture may place particular significance on informal rules of behaviour which elevate the importance of gratitude, respect, loyalty and secrecy. Thus, any failure to reciprocate and not offer due deference are regarded as acts of disrespect and disloyalty which in turn are severely frowned upon by wider society.

Yet caveats regarding political culture, historical conditions and traditional customs can often become champions for justifying unprincipled actions and enable ethical ambiguity or a muddying of the moral waters. In Ireland, as elsewhere, consensual attitudes towards political indiscretion can become so entrenched within a political system that it is regarded as perfectly normal. This ‘ culturally relativistic’ argument suggests that a society tolerates corruption because it is part of the culture.

The Hartley doctrine is used to suggest that the corruption of the past is incapable of ever being subject to enquiry. This argument follows that lines should be drawn underneath such episodes and the body public would best be served by moving forward without the indulgence of looking back. A society can only learn from its mistakes when it acknowledges that mistakes have been made. This unwillingness to unconditionally learn from the mistakes that have been made, ultimately filters down into wider public life. If it is no one’s fault, then of course, no one can be held accountable and for that reason nothing needs to change. In this scenario there is no obligation to learn from the past because the mindset of the past remains that of the present. Such intellectual paralysis can be circumvented by studying how corruption evolved and developed as it did, in order to understand the rationale for why it occurred. A descriptive case study analysis focuses on the context of an incident which allows the reader to evaluate how such behaviour occurred without imposing any obligation to make the judgement why.

The extensive volume of literature reflects the consensus that any classification is contested and divided between the public office,¹² market¹³ and public interest¹⁴ centred approaches, definitions based upon law¹⁵ and philosophical interpretations¹⁶ and various anthropological descriptions.¹⁷ Recent theoretical approaches have tended to view corruption from an economic and rational outlook where economic transaction is the central unit of analysis.¹⁸ This emphasis on rational choice based theorems and economic modelling neglects ethical dimensions of corruption.

These Byzantine philosophical and economic considerations, which have dominated academic discourse on different theoretical approaches, have been lost on a public more concerned about the practical repercussions of corruption. The focus on the difficulties in defining corruption can obscure the fact that a general definition actually exists.

A basic definition accepts that corruption occurs where there is a violation of laws or norms. Joseph S. Nye’s 1967 explanation still holds water today: ‘Corruption is behaviour which deviates from the normal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private regarding influence’.¹⁹ Nye’s approach however assumes a clear grasp of the terminology: benefit, abuse, public and private. His understanding of private gain does not include situations where the purpose of the misuse of public office is to benefit the official’s religion, political party, ethnic group or other affiliation.

A legal definition treats corruption as fixed, stemming from legal statutes where the law is clearly broken. This requires that all laws are precisely stated, leaving no doubts about their meaning and no discretion to the public officials.²⁰ This approach assumes that although certain activities are legal, it may lie outside norms of society. It does not take into account that the law itself may originate in corrupt practices or that the legitimacy of that law may be contested. A corrupt act can be camouflaged by lawful justification. For instance, ‘If an official’s act is prohibited by laws established by the government, it is corrupt; if it is not prohibited, it is not corrupt even if it is abusive or unethical’.²¹

Legislating for behaviour focuses on the legality of an action but not the morality of that same action. Dependence on legal interpretations of corruption cannot ‘divide shades of grey, but instead may separate the darkest black from the brightest white’.²² When a legal definition is exclusively applied to define personal conduct, legislation replaces obligations to personal ethical responsibility. Contemporary political life in Ireland, for instance, has consequently borne intimate witness to the defence that ‘I have broken no law; therefore I have done no wrong’. In this scenario, in the absence of an acknowledgement of personal ethical responsibility, the law will always play catch up.

Towards a new definition: clientelism and brokerage

The academic focus in Ireland on the distinctions between clientelism and brokerage is demonstrative of a legalistic understanding of corruption. It is argued, in the Irish case, that it is more accurate to describe the constituency work of politicians as brokerage, as distinct from clientelism. Ireland’s political culture, small size of society and administrative structures are cited as reasons why brokerage is predominant within Irish politics. The inability of citizens to negotiate the myriad structures of the state bureaucracy in order to access their rightful entitlements necessitates the legitimate intervention of a broker. In that academically celebrated phrase, politicians are said to be merely ‘busy harassing civil servants on behalf of constituents’.²³ The capacity failure of the Irish bureaucracy has warranted ‘inflexibility, rigid adherence to the rules and perhaps impatience with people who do not fully understand these rules’.²⁴

‘In many ways politicians brokerage activities are similar to the activities of a range of professional mediators (such as priests, advice centre personnel and trade union officials); the difference derives from their special access to the state bureaucracy and their specific motives in carrying out brokerage functions’. A broker deals in access to those who control resources rather than directly in the resources themselves.²⁵ The difficulty with this interpretation, that Irish politics is characterised not by clientelism but brokerage and that brokerage is a necessary evil given the traditional character of Irish politics, is that it is limited. It ignores the broader definition of clientelism and the long-term corollaries of brokerage.

Moreover, the narrow definition of clientelism is said to encompass the direct exchange of public goods and state resources to reward, support and bestow privilege to individuals for their political support.²⁶ The political actor acts as the patron and facilitates direct access to the state for their clients, the voters, who more often than not are friends, associates and family members. In return, the client is obliged to reciprocate through a demonstration of their loyalty by voting and engaging in political activity as directed by the patron. The client has to engage in this practice because without a patron, the client is politically isolated and without access to basic economic and social benefits in the gift of the state, such as government jobs and contracts, land rights, public services, public housing, special welfare benefits or public sector jobs. A patron-client exchange relationship is characterised by an imbalanced vertical pattern of reverence where ‘persons of higher social status (patrons) are linked to those of lower social status (clients) in personal ties of reciprocity that can vary in content and purpose across time’.²⁷

These key characteristics of clientelism are said to be ‘simply not present in (contemporary) Irish electoral politics’ because these direct benefits ‘are simply not in the gift of TDs’.²⁸ This is because politicians are ‘dependent on the votes of anonymous constituents with whom they could have no direct links’.²⁹ This interpretation of clientelism and the implicit tolerance of brokerage analyses Irish political culture within a context that accepts that because the formal system was inadequate, informal intervention by brokers were justifiable. This means to an end approach is reminiscent of modernisation theory, predominant within academic literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Behaviour which embraced informal influence was regarded as functional and as ‘a welcome lubricant’, necessary to grease the wheels of administrative incompetence in order to deliver a system of social and personal welfare that the official system could not.³⁰ It was the rational outcome of an inefficient rigid bureaucracy which suffocated flexibility and business exigency. Market considerations and self-interested behaviour took pre-eminence over moral concerns and was considered as a normal part of the political process within the traditions of contemporary political culture.

This approach also overlooks the enduring and undermining ‘moral connotations and value judgments with regard to democracy by stressing the beneficial effect’.³¹ The presumption about the absence of impropriety is systematic of a refusal to countenance it. This premise may account for why academic literature in Ireland has neglected to empirically research or theorise on grand corruption. It has been instead content to preoccupy itself with petty corruption, the presumed outcome of the brokerage and clientelistic intricacies of the Irish political system. The belief that brokerage humanises ‘the state in the eyes of people who would otherwise see it as remote’, counters the cynicism that attaches to politicians generally, and fails to appreciate that brokerage self-perpetrates the perception of impropriety.³²

A broader definition of clientelism accepts that a client or voter is not obliged to reciprocate in order to benefit from the direct exchange of public goods and state resources by a patron. The element of dependency, conditionality or contract in this exchange relationship is not explicit. However, the clientelism is implicit when the politician claims credit for having provided a clearly defined constituency with important benefits. It is not required that the politician discriminate between voters within his electoral district based on their voting preferences. It is sufficient that he discriminates against voters across constituencies by exacting disproportionate benefit on a particular constituency for political advantage.³³ When public officeholders focus on serving a particular client group linked to them by geographic ties, this shapes the public landscape and ultimately creates the conditions that are ripe for corruption.³⁴ Such conditions include blurring of the line between the public and private interest. The legitimacy of the state may be contested when the rule of law is used to advance private interests rather than protecting the public interest and where national leaders express weak commitment to combating corruption. The terminology of clientelism will be used in this study and unless specifically defined, will be taken to infer its wider interpretation.

Clientelism and brokerage do not stand for competing concepts and are not mutually exclusive but are mutually complementing terms. They can be subsumed as a specific form and concrete manifestation of a corrupt act. ‘When a patron occupies a public position or extracts favours from those in public positions, patronage and corruption overlap’.³⁵ Ultimately, each of these concepts concerns the relationship of power between those that hold public power and how this is utilised for private or public benefit. In this way, the conditions for corruption are established because clientelism and brokerage ultimately distort the relationship of power between public and private interests.

As contemporary political and cultural practices transform themselves, so too, does the conventional twentieth-century definition of corruption, the abuse of public office for private gain. The state has become more involved in people’s lives since the 1960s and consequently, modern governance has become more intricate as the demarcations between public and private have become more blurred. In turn, corruption as a multifaceted, systemic and global phenomenon continues to be redefined.

In this way, the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) deliberately does not provide for a generic, one-dimensional definition of corruption. This allows for the broadest possible interpretation and captures a typology of situations. The UNCAC came into force in 2005 and contains innovative measures on international cooperation, asset-recovery and the prevention and criminalisation of corruption. By August 2010, 140 countries had ratified the UNCAC, solidifying it as the basis for agreement on international anti-corruption action. As difficult as it is to present a universally satisfying list of corruption types, the UNCAC provides such a framework in Articles 15–28, within Chapter III of its Treaty.

The list of corruption offenses include, but are not limited to, bribery, embezzlement, trading in influence, abuse of function, illicit enrichment, money laundering, concealment, obstruction of justice, participation and attempt and knowledge. In defining and criminalising these offences, it becomes de-facto a definition. ‘Corruption is a fluid concept, signifying different things to different people. More importantly, it is an evolving concept … in view of the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon and the consequent difficulty of constructing a legal definition, the Convention adopted a descriptive approach, covering various forms of corruption that exist now’.³⁶ This approach by the UN, and its recognition of the evolving nature of corruption, underlines the central hypothesis of this book. Corruption is constantly changing and the case-studies presented illustrate this journey from one type of corruption to another.

Towards a new definition: mediated corruption

To that end, ‘mediated corruption’ is a more appropriate definition to account for the difficulties inherent within Nye’s explanation, such as the challenges of perception and the tensions between legal and moral approaches. Mediated corruption is defined as:

(1) the gain that the politician receives is political, not personal and is not illegitimate in itself, as in conventional corruption; (2) how the public official provides the benefit is improper, not necessarily the benefit itself, or the fact that the particular citizen receives the benefit; (3) the connection between the gain and the benefit is improper because it damages the democratic process, not because the public official provides the benefit with a corrupt motive.³⁷

This approach redefines the traditional assumption of private gain as a financial benefit and takes into consideration other types of gains, such as power, prestige, authority and symbolic capital through illicit means. It challenges the traditional means of defining reciprocity. It also places emphasis on the recipient of the illegitimate gain. The individual who abuses public office for private gain does not necessarily always directly benefit. Instead, the misuse of public office may indirectly benefit the public officials’ family, friends, political associates, political party, constituency or other affiliation associated with the public official. The gain is political, often indirect, and valuable within its own context. Corruption therefore is the use of public office for private gain without any direct link to a precise favour but in anticipation of future benefits. It may encompass undue influence in the formulation of policy and legislation by vested interests at the expense of the public interest but which benefit political actors through popular and political support.

Policy may be tailored to benefit specific geographic, demographic or socio-economic interest groups.³⁸ As Michael Johnston advocates: ‘If an official sponsors legislation, or uses her discretion to make administrative decisions, popular with a segment of the public, do the popularity and political support that may result constitute a private benefit?’³⁹ The benefit the political actor may accrue is popular or political support which influences the outcome of an election or secure promotion within the ranks of the political party or government structures. Or, the benefit that the politician gets is the preservation of existing political support because of a decision not to be forthright during the process of implementing an unpopular policy or legislation. Moreover, favourable decisions may be introduced just before an election and difficult choices are postponed until after an election. The case studies will demonstrate how such behaviour was regarded as part and parcel of Irish politics and which remained unchallenged until the 2000s.

The Metherall / Greiner circumstances are a case in point. Anthony (Tony) Metherall resigned as a minister within the Australian Parliament and as a member of the Liberal National Party in January 1992 because of tax offences. Although he remained in the parliament as an independent, he continued to vote with the minority government of the Prime Minister, Nick Greiner. In April of that year, Metherall resigned from the parliament itself. On the very same day, Greiner appointed him to a lucrative position within the New South Wales public service. The Australian Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) subsequently initiated an investigation. The Prime Minister was found to have contravened the anti-corruption legislation that he himself had sponsored through parliament.

The ICAC made the finding that Metherall’s appointment was improper because it damaged the democratic process, as it implied that Metherall was rewarded for his political support to the minority government despite his resignation. Greiner did not knowingly engage in wrongful conduct and made no private or personal gain from Metherall’s appointment. Nonetheless, he had created a public service job which had not existed heretofore and did not use proper public service appointment procedures. Greiner was instead deemed to have made a political gain because he solved a politically embarrassing problem. The elimination of Metherall from parliament created the political vacuum for a Liberal party member to become elected in his place and thus increased support for the Liberal government. Greiner subsequently