The Catholic Bishop of Limerick, Dr Donal Murray, took a fair old swipe at Irish society in an address to the Ceifin Conference in Ennis last Tuesday.Like all tigers, he said, the Celtic specimen could be a man-eater in a society which worships possessions, prestige and power.
His address was wide-ranging and, at one stage, the Bishop referred to a work published in 1953 which pointed to "the absurdity of the State failing to see its own limits and seeing itself as an educator in its own right".
Dr Murray didn't seem to see any irony in the fact that the objectionable elements in Irish society today (and there are many) are a result of an education system which is still in the hands of the religious, with little or no input from State authorities.
Irish society in 1953 was morally adrift because it had no focus other than enforced blind obedience to a particular religious moral code. It is as painfully adrift ethically today because, having abandoned its blind obedience to that narrow, hypocritical and cruelly cold code, it has not been equipped with the mental and philosophical agility to formulate any other.
And that is entirely the fault of the education system controlled and operated by the Church.
Surely if Ireland has turned out a crass, money-grubbing, vulgar, possession-worshipping population without finer philosophical values, it is the fault of the education system as provided by the Church? Nobody else was teaching a moral code.
The State still accepts the right of the Church to have the majority input into our education system: how can it do otherwise, when the political and civil authorities are themselves products of the system, and have been indoctrinated from childhood into accepting the Church's view of itself as the unselfish, altruistic moral arbiter?
We have been indoctrinated with a primeval anti-intellectualism by the system which prevents us asking fundamental questions about the logic and purpose of our belief systems.
In 1953, nobody in Ireland questioned the right of the religious to control society. The trouble is that we still do not question that right: rather we accept that it has a right to make the rules, even though we now realise that hellfire doesn't necessarily follow if we break them.
That came about due to the advent of outside influences, partly due to television and a breakdown in our rigid censorship system. When Ireland's closed borders were opened up, Irish people, long living in a darkness of fear, realised that you could enjoy yourself, live well, have fun, control fertility, even ask questions, and not be struck by a bolt from on high.
It had been happening all around the godless world, and people were surviving and thriving.
In effect, Irish people started to think that maybe hellfire for all eternity might be worth it if we ate, drank and were merry before the day death took us.
The opening of our borders showed us that waiting meekly in cold, hunger and deprivation in hope of an eternal reward ran a very poor second to lifting yourself out of the mire of ignorance and poverty in this life.
The difficulty was that nobody and nothing, least of all the Church-controlled education system, had made any allowances for people who thought for themselves. The only set of values available was the peculiarly Jansenistic form of Irish Catholicism which equated misery with spirituality, ugliness with loftiness of soul.
Step outside the rules, and you were without moral focus, because you had been "educated" to believe that thinking for yourself was sinful.
The abuse of power, Dr Murray said in his address -- whether in the Church or in governments, or by the wealthy or privileged -- can destroy those it coerces, and those who use it.
He was absolutely right: the Church coerced people into what it considered morality by ensuring that there was no alternative -- hungry and ignorant people are much easier to control than those who live in light and comfort.
And the Church was the abuser of its faithful for generations in Ireland in many more ways than the perfidious exploitation which has emerged in the various sexual scandals which have beset it in recent years.
People were led to believe that a decent standard of living was dangerous, and that education that taught you to think for yourself was an abomination in the sight of the Lord. Liberalism was decadent. That was the core of the problem: with the arrival of prosperity and the questioning of religious domination came a genuine moral dearth.
Sex had been the only sin; now it was out of the Church's control, but people had no awareness of other immoralities such as bribery, corruption, and greed. Nor had they been given the equipment to deal with prosperity: vulgar consumerism unmatched in the western world became the order of the day.
Aggression became a synonym for confidence, civilised behaviour the sign of a wimp.
Nobody had been taught that the basis for ethical behaviour as well as for manners was a realisation that you were not the centre of the world, and that there were others on the planet with rights.
"How could (the State) set out to prepare people for life when it can give no coherent account either of what a person is or what life is for?" Bishop Murray asked.
"The State as such cannot answer philosophical or religious questions but it must not fail to understand how fundamental these questions are in the motivation and self-understanding, and indeed the educational development of individuals and groups," he said.
In other words, let us, the Church, continue to control education. In other words, you cannot have ethical behaviour without religion. This is a plea on behalf of the institution which has signally failed to give its people a moral focus outside complete subservience, an institution which fought tooth and nail against any philosophy being taught to schoolchildren, so that in refusing to obey a moral code based on superstition and fear, people found themselves unable to understand that ethics and religion were not necessarily one and the same.
Faith now appeared in the public arena "in the form of controversies, scandals and personalities, rather than questions about God", Bishop Murray told his audience. Whose fault is that, we can only ask?
The Church has discouraged, to put it no more strongly, discussion about the nature and existence of god, regarding it as a topic for discussion only among its loftier theologians.
And the controversies, scandals and personalities are engendered by the behaviour of churchmen themselves.
Mass communication has shone a light on the behaviour of churchmen; and we are now asked to accept that their frequently vile and vicious behaviour only proves how human they are. But for years the Church taught that those called to the religious life had a "special grace".
That was why people had a right to expect religious to behave better than the rest of humanity.
Bishop Donal Murray is right: there is much wrong in Irish society, from vulgarity to cruelty and criminality.
But wagging a finger outward will not find the source of the illness: that belongs in the system of religious education which produced our society.
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