Michael Lowry led the Regional Independent Group whose support was decisive in forming the current Irish government in January 2025. He has carried Moriarty Tribunal findings since 2011, including the conclusion that what "was contemplated and attempted on the part of Mr Dunne and Mr Lowry was profoundly corrupt to a degree that was nothing short of breathtaking" in the matter of a rent-review scheme, and separately that he "imparted substantive information" of "significant value and assistance" to Denis O'Brien in securing the second GSM mobile licence. In March 2026, the Director of Public Prosecutions confirmed no criminal charges would arise from the tribunal's findings against either man. The decision to form a government around his bloc was taken with all of this on the public record. He could not, from inside his own head, model how that reads from outside. The country could not, from inside its own habituation, model how it should read. Both ends of the empathy circuit were anaesthetised at the same time, which is exactly the condition the science of power predicted.

Henry Adams, writing in 1907 in his autobiographical Education, observed: "The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates." He thought he was being poetic. He was being medical. The last twenty years of neuroscience have confirmed it with brain scanners and behavioural studies, and the finding the Irish political class needs to absorb is this. As power and wealth go up, empathy and compassion go down. Measurably. Replicably. With a dose-response curve.

The science

In 2006, the Columbia Business School researcher Adam Galinsky and colleagues ran an experiment that has been repeated dozens of times since. Participants were primed by recalling a moment of being powerful, or a moment of feeling powerless. They were then asked to draw a capital E on their own forehead. Around thirty-three per cent of the powerful-primed participants drew the letter for themselves, mirror-reversed to anyone else in the room. Among the powerless-primed group, the figure was twelve per cent. From a few minutes of remembering being in charge, the ability to take another perspective measurably degraded to nearly three times the powerless-condition rate.

The neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi and his collaborators pushed the finding into the brain itself. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, their 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General measured the brain's mirroring response, the neural mechanism by which we vicariously feel what other people feel. The mirroring response is what makes you wince when somebody else cuts a finger. It is the literal neural substrate of empathy. They found that priming people with power, again just a memory exercise, suppressed motor resonance in the mirroring system. The empathy circuit went quiet under power exposure measured in minutes.

At Berkeley, the social psychologist Paul Piff has spent over a decade documenting the dose-response. His 2012 PNAS paper, "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior," reported seven studies in which upper-class participants were more likely to break traffic laws, fail to yield to pedestrians, take from communal goods, lie in negotiations and endorse unethical workplace behaviour. The mechanism the paper identified was "more favourable attitudes toward greed," a measurable shift in moral framing that tracked the social-class gradient.

The demonstration most people know from Piff is the rigged-Monopoly game from his 2013 TED talk, a vivid illustration consistent with his published findings even though the Monopoly study itself has not appeared in peer-reviewed form. Two players, one given twice the starting money and two dice instead of one, the structural advantage randomised and known to both. The advantaged players became louder, more dismissive, more entitled over the course of the game. They took more pretzels from the shared bowl. They slammed their tokens. Asked afterward how they had won, none of them said luck. They told stories about strategy. They had absorbed the structural advantage as personal merit within a single sitting, and their treatment of the disadvantaged player had degraded in parallel.

The aggregate finding across Piff's twenty-year corpus, replicated across many studies, is the dose-response. As wealth and power increase, the measurable indicators of empathy and pro-social behaviour decrease. The relationship is not categorical. It is not "the rich are bad and the poor are good." It is gradient. The longer the exposure, the higher the dose, the more pronounced the deterioration of the circuit that lets a person model the experience of those they have power over.

This is not a metaphor. Adams used a metaphor in 1907 because the metaphor was the only language available. The instrument that confirmed his observation arrived a century later, and confirmed it.

What the framers caught, what Bunreacht missed

The implications for political constitution-writing are large and concrete.

The American framers built an architecture of checks and balances against accumulated power without knowing why the human brain required it. They reasoned from history. They watched what kings, generals and consuls did to themselves and their subjects across millennia of recorded behaviour, and they encoded a defensive structure. The two-term presidential cap was not in the original constitution. It arrived in 1951 as the 22nd Amendment, after Franklin Roosevelt held the office for twelve years and one month, and the consequences of unchecked tenure became too obvious to leave to convention. The architecture caught up to the dose-response by hard experience, not by neuroscience.

The Irish constitution did not catch up. Bunreacht na hÉireann, approved by plebiscite on 1 July 1937 and in force since that December, places no cap on the tenure of the Taoiseach. None on Tánaiste. None on cabinet ministers. The office can be held for as long as the holder commands a Dáil majority, which in coalition-arithmetic Ireland has produced single-person tenures of more than a decade and same-party tenures of two and three. The radiation shield that the American constitutional architecture eventually grew was never grafted onto the Irish equivalent. The absence has, until recently, looked like a tradition. The science recasts it as a known design flaw.

The Irish dose-response

Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach from June 1997 to May 2008. Eleven years. The Mahon Tribunal, reporting in March 2012, found that he had failed to truthfully account for substantial sums lodged to accounts associated with him during his tenure, including £165,000 in connected accounts whose explanations the tribunal did not accept. The deterioration curve is in the public record. The early Ahern, the negotiating, coalition-building, Good-Friday-Agreement Ahern of 1997 and 1998, is not the same operator as the late-period Ahern of bizarre tribunal testimony and Manchester race-track digressions. The man at year eleven was not the man at year one. The dose did its work.

Charles Haughey held the office across three terms between December 1979 and February 1992, the cumulative damage visible across each return. The McCracken Tribunal in 1997 confirmed Ben Dunne's payments. The Moriarty Tribunal's December 2006 Part 1 report documented approximately £8.5 million in undeclared payments to Haughey between 1979 and 1996, a sum equivalent to about €11 million in restated values. The man at year one was already compromised. The man across the cumulative years became something the country has spent thirty years not knowing how to describe. The deterioration was not linear, it was load-bearing.

The current pattern is different in form and identical in mechanism. No individual Taoiseach has reached the Ahern length since Ahern. Varadkar, Martin, Harris have rotated, the personal dose lower for each. The party dose has not. Fianna Fáil was in government for fifteen of the eighteen years between 1989 and 2007. Fine Gael has been in government continuously since March 2011. Whichever combination of personnel rotates through the cabinet rooms, the institutional dose accumulates in the party machinery, in the senior civil service, in the relationships between the long-tenured ministers and the long-tenured industries that depend on them. PR-STV produces individual rotation. It does not produce institutional rotation. The dose-response operates on the institution as readily as on the individual.

The Lowry case

Michael Lowry has never been Taoiseach. He was Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications under the Rainbow Coalition from December 1994, resigning from cabinet in November 1996 after the Dunne payments emerged. His career since the Moriarty Tribunal's findings has been a decades-long demonstration that the dose-response operates wherever sustained office plus accumulated power-broking concentration accumulate, not only at the top of the formal hierarchy. The empathy-anaesthesia visible in his case is not because he was once a senior minister. It is because he has been a sustained holder of accumulated leverage, electoral, financial and brokerage, across thirty years of accumulating it. The fact that his return to the centre of government formation in January 2025 prompted no constitutional crisis, and that the DPP's March 2026 decision not to prosecute prompted no public mobilisation, tells you that the country's empathy circuits, the public version of the same neural mechanism, have been habituated to the dose alongside him. Both ends of the circuit anaesthetised together.

The argument

This is the argument for term limits, and it is biological before it is moral.

Term limits are not a punishment imposed on politicians. They are a recognition that the human brain is not designed to absorb sustained power without measurable damage. They are a radiation shield grafted onto the constitutional architecture, designed to protect the population from the neurological gradient that operates inside the office regardless of which individual occupies it. The office-holder is not the problem. The office is the problem, and the office's effect on whoever sits in it is the problem the constitution must solve.

What the science adds to a political argument that has been available since Adams in 1907, since the American framers in 1787, since Cromwell, Caesar and every collapsed republic before them, is the dose-response curve. The argument does not depend on identifying corrupt individuals. It does not require that any current office-holder be accused of anything. It requires only that we accept the same biological gradient that applies to every other system of sustained human exposure, that it operates here too, and that constitutional architecture is the only known tool for managing it at scale.

The proposal

A constitutional cap of two consecutive Dáil terms on the office of Taoiseach, on the model of the American 22nd Amendment and on the model now being pursued by Péter Magyar's Tisza party in Hungary, where Magyar took office as Prime Minister in April 2026 and Tisza has tabled a constitutional amendment imposing a two-term cap, with retroactive effect from 1990. The cap protects the country from the neurological inevitability of long tenure rather than from any individual's particular failings. It treats the office as the dose and limits the exposure.

A second-stage version of the same proposal addresses the same-party long-tenure case, the institutional dose. The mechanism is harder to specify and politically harder to land. It is the more important one in Irish conditions, where coalition arithmetic and PR-STV individual rotation disguise institutional continuity that, by the same dose-response logic, produces the same deterioration at a level the personal cap does not reach. Both pieces are necessary. One is constitutional, the other is electoral-architectural. Both are downstream of the same science.

The international corpus

The evidence base is large and growing more uncomfortable to ignore. Vladimir Putin has held the top of Russian power for more than a quarter-century, since August 1999, the deterioration visible in the war he has chosen to prosecute, the leadership purges and the consolidation of total control. Xi Jinping engineered the removal of the two-term limit on the Chinese presidency in March 2018 and has held the office without constitutional constraint since. Benjamin Netanyahu has cycled through the Israeli premiership across three stints since 1996, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, the deterioration visible in the catastrophe of cabinet governance and the policies it has authorised. Each case is a national tragedy in its specifics. Each is a confirmation of the dose-response in its mechanism. Ireland does not have the geopolitical weight of any of them. The protective effect of constitutional term limits is, if anything, more important in a smaller, denser polity where the networks are tighter and the recovery from accumulated damage is slower.

The patient

The Irish political class will resist this proposal because the people most damaged by the dose are the people who would have to vote for it. The science does not require their assent. It requires the public to understand that the long-tenured politician they used to admire and have stopped admiring did not change because of one decision or one scandal. The change happened in the office. It happens to almost everyone. It will happen to whoever holds the office next. The only known protection against it is the cap.

Power is a tumour. The office is the dose. The constitution should treat the population as the patient.

Source notes. A. Galinsky, J. Magee, M. Inesi, D. Gruenfeld, "Power and Perspectives Not Taken," Psychological Science 17(12), 1068-1074, 2006. J. Hogeveen, M. Inzlicht, S. Obhi, "Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(2), 755-762, 2014. P. Piff, D. Stancato, S. Côté, R. Mendoza-Denton, D. Keltner, "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior," PNAS 109(11), 4086-4091, 2012; Monopoly demonstration from Piff's 2013 TED talk. H. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Chapter X "Political Morality (1862)." Moriarty Tribunal, Final Report (March 2011) on Lowry and the Dunne / O'Brien matters; Moriarty Tribunal Part 1 Report (December 2006) on Haughey undeclared payments 1979-1996. Mahon Tribunal, Final Report (March 2012) on Ahern. United States Constitution, Twenty-second Amendment, ratified 27 February 1951. Bunreacht na hÉireann, approved by plebiscite 1 July 1937, in force 29 December 1937. Tisza Party (Hungary), constitutional amendment tabling a two-term cap on the Prime Minister, April 2026.

Overwatch Report is an independent publication. We have no financial positions in any entity mentioned.