One of the things about living in modern Ireland is that it is, in general, almost impossible to have a conversation about the moral character of the nation. This is probably because having conversations about the moral character of the nation is something closely associated in our collective imagination with the dark and repressive ™ Ireland of the past where certain bishops preached chastity from the altar while enjoying special time with their housekeepers, and moving objectively depraved Priests from parish to parish, and altarboy to altarboy. The church was, at one time, the conscience of the nation. Sadly, it forfeited any claim to that role.
I say sadly not because I have any particular desire to listen to national lectures on chastity and sexual purity, but because it’s increasingly hard to shake the feeling that there’s a moral rot eating away at the country. In the last month, for example, the Irish courts have heard a case involving a nephew kicking his own elderly uncle to death. They’ve heard a case where a husband allegedly poured boiling water over his own wife and then cracked her on the head with a hammer. Though the accused in that case has not been convicted, the courts have heard that he has admitted the attack. Yesterday, a man was found guilty of stabbing his 73-year-old neighbour to death with a machete, leaving the man’s body almost unrecognisable. Their row, apparently, was about cats.
All of this is to say nothing of the spate of non-fatal stabbings, assaults, and other violent attacks on people that are now a weekly feature of the Irish justice system.
What the three cases mentioned have in common is that they all involve Irish people, born and raised and matured in Irish society, and none of them appear to involve people with a raft of previous convictions. All three also involve allegations of extreme, horror-movie level, violence. Another thing that they have in common is that with respect to the Gardai, none of them were cases that appear to have been particularly hard to solve. The hardest was the case of Thomas Lorigan, who left bloody footprints matching his boots at the scene of his uncle’s murder, and given that the boots were swiftly found in his possession, the case didn’t provide much of a challenge. In each case, it might be said that the crimes were carried out without much premeditation when it came to the idea of evading being caught. In each case, the facts might bear the description of a crime of impulse, or of passion.
One of the troubling things about crime statistics is that it is very hard to separate this kind of crime out from other crimes: The murder rate might tell you that levels of homicide in Ireland have remained relatively stable since 1990, especially if you exclude the results of the gangland violence of the mid 2010s, but what they do not tell you is whether the crimes involving horrific violence have specifically increased.
What we can say, with some confidence, is that 30 or even 20 years ago any one of those crimes would probably have been the crime of the year in terms of the media, because they certainly would have been rarer. One might recall at this juncture the case of Catherine Nevin, who arranged her husband’s murder in 1996, and whose case shocked the nation. Or the case of the Mulhall sisters (dubbed the Scissor Sisters by the press) whose 2005 murder of their mother’s boyfriend turned them into household names. It is difficult to imagine that such violence would be considered as unusual, or as newsworthy, today.
The trouble with writing or talking about this stuff is that it’s very difficult to identify something tangible: It remains true that the vast majority of people are decent and will go through life without deliberately inflicting horrible violence on another. Yet it also seems intuitively true that as a society we are more numbed to horrible violence than we used to be, even by the standards of a relatively short two decades ago. To make sense of it all you probably need to delve into a whole discussion about shared morality and societal values, which used to be the realm of the church, and which even yours truly, as an old-fashioned moral conservative, hesitates to start.
I will, though, make a couple of observations: First, if we have a shared morality at all these days, that morality might best be described as unconditional tolerance for other value systems. It is now unthinkable, for example, to suggest that violence and cruelty should not be portrayed on screen in a way that might glamourise it. A person complaining to RTE or Virgin Media that a particular movie or TV show glorified violence would quickly be told to mind their own business and watch something else. There’s a logic to that, but as the case of Brianna Ghey in the UK showed, some people who watch violent things will be corrupted by them, to the harm and detriment of others. Sometimes, a shared and restrictive morality really is for the common good, unthinkable as we might find that idea in 2024.
Second, as Pope Benedict noted, we live in an era of extreme individualism and relativism. That is to say that the notion of self-restraint or self-sacrifice being obligatory to help others is largely gone. For example, while we now live in a society that might yet admire families where one parent stays at home with the children, our moral values make abundantly clear that this is a question of choice, not morality. You are not obliged by social convention to give up a career, for example, for the benefit of your children. The same goes for our elderly, as the number of care homes have expanded while the number of family members looking after their elders has fallen, and it’s certainly no longer seen as an absolute moral obligation. Is it possible that a choose-your-own adventure attitude to life and morality has lessened the inherent instinct against lashing out against those in the way, at least in the most extreme and fringe cases? I think it is.
Third, there’s a general and measurable shift in attitudes toward the sanctity of life. We are presently discussing whether to legalise assisted dying and/or euthanasia. We have shifted our laws on abortion. There are moves afoot to legalise drugs which largely centre on the moral argument that taking them is a legitimate choice. All of this adds up to a weakening of the idea that you have a moral obligation to treat your own life, and that of others, as something sacred.
The point here is not whether I am right or wrong about the above, but rather that these are conversations we are uncomfortable having as a country. It may be that the general increase in shocking crimes is entirely unrelated to any of the above, or even to the need for a shared morality at all. Nevertheless, I am privileged to have this space to air my thoughts, and this is something that’s been on my mind for a few weeks as the number of shocking crimes in the courts system continues to pile up. We don’t have the church any more, and it strikes me that in some ways, we’re worse off for that. Our politicians don’t provide moral leadership – and whether we like it or not, moral leadership is something every successful society in human history has had. The absence of it in Ireland, I fear, is doing us harm.