"Corruption in politics isn't just about politicians putting money in their own pockets. Political parties themselves have become dinosaurs which gobble up money rather than institutions that mediate between citizens and those who are actively involved in politics, " he said.

The Catholic Church leader said that people involved in exploitation and corruption should not take holy communion, no more than a drug baron known to have ordered somebody's killing should do so, adding that he hoped no politician would use communion as a "photo-op" for his own position.

"If people have the idea that there is always corruption in politics and you just have to live with that, the tribunals become a sort of theatre where somebody is caught and shown up in public.

That isn't the way we should be workingf every profession has to auto-regulate itself with its own code of conduct, " he said in a wide-ranging interview in today's Sunday Tribune.

In relation to political ambivalance about wrongdoing, Dr Martin said:

"There must be democratically founded institutions to address the loopholes and temptations that are always there in public life and we should try to ensure that those institutions are strengthened and transparent. People must have confidence in these institutions."

Emphasising the need for a "politics of idealism", he said Ireland was coming to a stage where we need one of those quantitative leaps in politics that we've had at different times in history.

"The economy is not run by the state. It's run by business and business has an interest in a particular type of framework. It is inevitable that politics and economies are legimately linked, but it can go terribly wrong. In the complex world we live in, the room for things to go wrong and money to pass becomes huge, " he said.

The level of violence in Irish society shocks him, he admitted, and he has noticed a weakening of respect for human life. "What's going on here?

Everyday there's another version. Now there's somebody in a slurry tank.

"People get annoyed when you say a garda was killed or an innocent bystander, but you can't have a city where people go around having their wild west and it doesn't matter to most of us as long as it doesn't happen in our street."

Dr Martin queried why people who use cocaine for recreational purposes don't see any link with a 19-year-old being killed. "You get people using cocaine on a Saturday night and eating organic food on a Sunday, " he said.

And he suggested that assets seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau should be given back to communities.

He criticised the consultation process for the proposed new national children's hospital and noted that the professional consultants had still not presented their proposals. As chairman of Our Lady's Hospital, Crumlin, he said he was worried about the overutilisation of intensive care units there and the level of risk this posed.

"The hospital situation was not moving as quickly as it should, he said. "In such a modern era, to think that hospitals are places where people get sick . . . that says something about society."