I’m aware that I risk becoming a crashing bore by banging on about the latest Irish political crisis, which in the global scheme of things appears irredeemably petty and parochial. It’s just that the kerfuffle over Bertie Ahern’s financial improprieties represents one of those episodes that forces you to recognize that a substantial proportion of your compatriots, despite the supposed ties of a shared culture and society, actually inhabit an entirely different ethical universe.

Take John Waters, for example. I am, of course, here referring to the bearded sage of Roscommon rather than the American filmmaker. In his column for today’s Irish Times, he adopts his customary contrarian stance regarding l’affaire Bertie. With the surly wisdom of a hill farmer come to the big smoke to teach the city slickers a real lesson, he aims to offer “a brief and by no means exhaustive inventory of values which may have been dropped unnoticed off the back of the trailer this week as we overloaded the front with outrage about matters of financial and fiscal compliance.”

Note here the canny use of that agricultural metaphor, the overloaded trailer, designed to make SUV-driving suburban types tug at their collars in guilt. It is also interesting that Waters appears to employ the word “outrage” according to the standards of normal Irish usage–not to denote genuine anger, but to suggest a fabricated emotion, grounded in hypocrisy.

Waters then proceeds to list some of the down-to-earth, solid Irish values that have been sacrificed to that false god, probity.

The following is classic Waters: off the leash, bounding away from reality like a greyhound at a coursing meet (how’s that for a bit of rustic simile-coining?):

“Friendship: Without a friendship there would be no such thing as society, which is really a macro-society of friends. Is the Minister for Finance not entitled to have friends, and are such individuals not entitled to act in friendship in the same way as the friends of other categories of human being–in support of those they love and admire?”

One feels almost rude to interrupt this surfer-Jesus spiel, but society is not “really” a macro-society of friends. It consists of a lot of people I don’t know and probably wouldn’t want to know. But that’s OK, because our behaviour towards each other is actually governed by society, which is based on cold, heartless abstractions such as laws and impartial institutions. In contrast, people who aim to create societies of like-minded friends–people like us–are sometimes called fascists. Not that I think Waters, perhaps envisioning some kind of shaggy Brehon fraternity, deserves such a damning label. But his is not exactly an inclusive framework for a 21st-century multi-ethnic nation.

Ultimately, after reading Waters (or skimming his text to be honest), one is left mystified by how willing he is to come to the defence of the indefensible. After all, for arrogant politicos like Dermot Ahern or Brian Cowen coming out with guff like “Is the Minister for Finance not entitled to have friends?” is the price that must be paid for staying in government.

But perhaps Waters is willing to play his role as “independent thinker,” to the hilt, even at the risk of personally losing one of those values he claims has fallen off the trailer in the past week: Dignity.