Governments are descending more and more into disregard for the law. Policemen are now able to condemn persons or groups without even a charge being made in court. A minister for justice can condemn fellow citizens without having to supply evidence. Can condemn police for wrongdoing without having to supply evidence either. Can condemn a newspaper as a Nazi propaganda sheet before it is even printed. People can be arrested and imprisoned without evidence while the public is fobbed off with "evidence will be produced".
Eventually. Maybe.
And what odds whether it is or not.
A government gives over Shannon airport to aircraft carrying soldiers, arms and war materials on their way to and from an illegal war. Yet during more than thirty long, sad years any of the rest of us could be arrested and jailed for having a telephone directory, or a pair of scissors or an alarm clock with insulating tape, or a list of elected representatives, anything under that vaguest of headings "being useful to terrorists".
Our homes could raided and ruined, our people insulted, all because we might be aiding and abetting a war against the government. And judges sitting in courts which are supposed to dispense justice and be meeting places for reason and common sense solemnly said yes to some of the most appalling travesties of justice Ireland has ever seen.
Indeed, yes, it is not the people who are descending into criminality, it is governments.
Why is it that a policeman who makes political statements and presides over a police who are so politicised that tens of thousands of people cannot trust them is not invited to go home?
Why is it that judges and prosecutors who worked in the appalling Diplock courts are still invited to hear and plead cases in our courts which we say we are trying to civilise?
Why is it that a minister of justice can sidestep the means of justice which people have laboured so sorely for so many generations to create?
Why is it that an Irish citizen or a British subject can be jailed for allowing a backyard to be used for purposes of armed conflict and a government can be allowed to give over one of Ireland's most important assets for unlimited use by the military of a foreign power, and be praised for doing it?
Why do people still talk about Ireland being neutral in world conflicts when it has consistently supported one government, the London one, even against its own people? When it has allowed one party in an international war to use its airspace and major airport without even looking to see what in their aircraft? And has refused to allow its own police even to glance inside the planes to see whether some poor orange-clad wretch is being transported through Ireland of the Welcomes to Saudi Arabia of the eye-gougers? Or to anywhere else where torture can be bought at so much an hour?
The Irish problem about all this is not the answers to these questions, it is that most people are not even asking the questions. And those who do ask them can so easily be marked out for public condemnation – without trial – because of national security. Those of us who are old enough to remember it will shudder in anticipation of what is still to come.
We old ones saw it all in the 1930s. The same censorship, the same threats to those who dare to speak out, the same bypassing of legal processes in the name of the public good. As if the public good could ever be served by brushing aside the legal safeguards we believed we had secured after such a long struggle. The European dictators did it all in the twenties and thirties.
The one-party state which so many people in Ireland's northeast want, the hatred of radical or even left-wing parties, the carefully nurtured hatred of minorities, the drive towards fully employed but rigidly controlled working people, the concentration of power, the struggle for power among the newspapers competing with each other to be on the side of those they think powerful enough to win at any cost, the mocking destruction of people who say the king has no clothes, or that if he has any he stinks beneath them.
We saw it all. That we saw it all is tragedy enough. But that generations later people are allowing it to happen again is a greater tragedy still. The respectabilising of evil. The mocking of what is good. Coming up to Christmas it is as good a time as any to remember these things.
You know, of course, why Jesus Christ was executed. Mr Caiphas put it very well, I think: national security.
