(The Nationalist, 05 May 2000)
You don’t have to be particularly perceptive or shrewd to be able to draw the conclusion that, in some court cases at least, somebody, on one side or other of the case, is not telling the truth. It’s pretty obvious if you look at reportage of court cases and tribunal hearings, that people, whose accounts of events are significantly at variance with each other, cannot all be acting in good faith, telling what they truly believe happened in a particular case. Some of the compo cases are pretty clear examples, with exaggerated claims for loss due to stress and trauma.
This is not something which began with the tribunal hearings of recent years. It goes back longer than that. I can recall the late Bishop Lucey of Cork preaching about it in one of his confirmation sermons in the nineteen fifties.
What does it mean to do this? It means that a person, called to court to give evidence, stands up in public, takes a bible in his or her hand, and states aloud, ‘I swear by almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God’ – and then proceeds to tell lies.
Does such a person have no sense of shame? How can he or she look at themselves in a mirror and not turn away?
What is it that lies behind this? Is it cowardice, the lack of moral backbone to tell the truth whatever the cost? Is it the cute hoor mentality, simply not caring as long as I get away with it? Is it a deliberate fudging of issues so as to avoid committing myself to anything which might exact a cost? Is it sitting on the fence about truth and justice as if they didn’t matter? Is it the culmination of a long-standing practice of telling lies to get out of difficult situations?
Whatever it may be in those terms, it is surely a supreme insult to God to call him as a witness to the truth of what we are saying when we know we are about to tell lies. Is God a fool, a simpleton who can be fobbed off with an empty formula of words?
Perjury brings about a loss of trust between people. It creates cynicism (as if we didn’t have enough of that already!) about the process of justice. It leaves people with the feeling that the most effective liar wins the case. It devalues the evidence of those who are telling the truth as it gradually insinuates an attitude that, since some are lying anyway, and you can’t always be sure who it is, then maybe much of the evidence on both sides has to be taken with a grain of salt. Where does that leave the honest person but at a wholly unfair disadvantage?
I was talking to a teenager some years ago and he asked me, ‘What’s the definition of an honest man?’ ‘You tell me,’ I replied. ‘A fool,’ he said. It’s not only teenagers who think like that.
Where does that leaves a sense of community? It means that it’s everyone for himself and you trust no one. What quality of human relationships can we have where we cannot rely on a person not to tell lies, even when under oath?
Wouldn’t we have a much healthier society if ordinary men and women committed themselves firmly and without ambiguity to kicking out the nod, wink and nudge culture and became instead the kind of people whose Yes means Yes and whose No means No.