If you’re going to say sorry, don’t do it with strings attached
SORRY isn’t always the hardest word to say, but when it gets said too often or too late you get a feeling that the concept of a genuine apology is devalued.
Gardaí have now said sorry to Joanne Hayes for the trauma she was put through over the Kerry Babies case. There is no doubt that the apology is genuine but you would have to wonder why it took 33 years, coming long after most of the people who were directly involved and should have said sorry are gone.
But if nothing else it seems to me that the Garda learned a very valuable lesson from the Kerry Babies debacle, that there were far better ways to treat women whose babies were hidden, secretly died or were abandoned, than dragging them into a police station and coercing confessions from them.
I remember being in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry, some years after the discovery of Baby John when the remains of another baby were washed ashore. I was struck by the compassion of the gardaí involved. As far as I know, they never found that mother either, but their appeal for her to come forward was not to pin a crime on her but out of concern for her welfare.
The current era of saying we’re collectively sorry as a State for the wrongs of the past began in 1999 when the then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologised for the treatment of people held in institutions, mainly run by Catholic orders, because the State had abdicated its own duty of care.
The Redress Scheme that followed cost the taxpayers €1.5bn, €970m in compensation, €192m in legal fees, and the rest in various ancillary costs.
Spending that vast amount of money compensating people for the past was, in some ways, a further abdication of the State’s responsibility. Would it not have been more beneficial to invest it in the future instead of atoning for the sins of the past?
The question also arises: does ‘saying sorry’ provide a corporate excuse for not taking responsibility?
The financial regulator, Patrick Neary, who presided over the bank collapse of 2009 was “deeply sorry”, while the chairman of Allied Irish Bank, Dermot Gleeson, the chief executive of Bank of Ireland, Brian Goggin, and a host of other bankers marched into the Banking Inquiry apologising for their failures.
Two former Taoisigh, Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern, also apologised.
“I did try to do my best to do right by the Irish people” said Mr Ahern, and you have to believe him.
The same goes for the others – none of them wanted to fail so spectacularly, they just got carried away with what was going on at the time, the addictive opiate of stamp duty, corporate profits and popular policies of the ‘one for everyone in the audience’ variety.
They were too busy taking pride in the Celtic Tiger to see that it was about to swallow them all in a few hungry gulps.
IN the confession box, the penitent comes out with a penance. Almost all of the politicians and the bankers who failed to protect Ireland from the great recession walked away without any sanction, most of them with massive payoffs or goldplated pensions.
The developers whose greed for helicopters, yachts, trophy homes and racehorses are almost all back, surfing the new wave of prosperity.
In recent weeks, all five major banks “sincerely apologised” for the tracker mortgage scandal. But this came only after years of trench
warfare with their customers, some of whom lost their livelihoods, homes and marriages. The new wave of bankers obviously didn’t learn any lessons from the apologies of the past, until they were forced on bended knees by threats from the Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.
One man who did eventually fall on his sword was the Sinn Féin TD Barry McElduff, who infamously wore a loaf of Kingsmill bread on his head in an idiotic display of ignorance on the 42nd anniversary of the massacre of innocent Protestant workers. His apology wasn’t enough to deflect the public revulsion caused by his actions. When the apology failed to turn the tide of public opprobrium, Sinn Féin’s last pragmatic step was to dump him.
The Harvey Weinstein scandal unleashed a plethora of apologies, many of them blaming “the culture of the time” or worse still, “if I offended anybody, I sincerely apologise”.
If you are going to say sorry, don’t do it with strings attached. That kind of apology is only made in the hope of putting an end to the controversy, without necessarily fixing the problem.
The HSE has also apologised for the latest A&E crisis.
The question is will they have to apologise again next year, or will they actually do something about it, so that the problem does not reoccur?
Most of us would prefer a solution to the problem than a lame apology, knowing full well the merry-goround will start up sometime in the future.
“I never apologise,” declared George Bernard Shaw: he wouldn’t last long in this unforgiving world.