The Untouchables

Most odious of all is that we have more than one Eliot Ness... we just don’t support them

The dapper PR man had spent all of the day of April 18, 2000 talking cobblers about an account at AIB bank in Rathfarnham. He couldn’t recall what he had done with the hundreds of thousands of pounds that had passed through it. Yet as Frank Dunlop blathered, I thought of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables.

Back then, 16 years ago, I was a young reporter who spent much of his week under the corrugated iron roof of a large shed in Dublin Castle.

That day we sensed an arrogant, powerful and corrupt man had been cornered. Sick of the evasion, Justice Fergus Flood wound up the day’s hearing of the Flood Tribunal by saying to Dunlop: ‘Perhaps you might reflect overnight and tell us what was the purpose of the bank account.’

Dunlop, too, sensed a reckoning: he might be facing the slammer. The following day he returned and gave an extraordinary account of how he had passed out hundreds of thousands in bribery and corruption involving politicians and businessmen. Maybe I was guileless, maybe a little flush with youthful notions that bad guys ‘go down’ and good guys get their man, but I truly believed the disclosures might be a seminal moment for Ireland. The Government would now move and set a up an independent law enforcement agency immune to political pressure that would be the curse of white-collar criminals.

There would be an Eliot Ness, a cool, clean hero like Kevin Costner’s character in the classic 1987 Brian De Palma movie The Untouchables. And forensic accountants like Oscar Wallace. And tough Irish cops, like Jimmy Malone, to interrogate financial gangsters in language they would understand.

It would have to be an agency with huge resources, real powers and be free of the meddling of politicians and the traditional civil service.

But the tribunals droned on for another decade – providing good news copy but by the time they got around to each issue it was ancient history. The Moriarty Tribunal reported in 2011, Flood was replaced by Justice Mahon and he issued his final report in 2012.

By then Enda Kenny was in power and he had found a perfect replacement for a tribunal: the toothless and ponderous Inquiry, a forum for political fudge.

The governments led by Enda Kenny, who has been in power since 2011, like inquiries.

He has established lots of formal Commissions of Investigation. There is the Cregan Inquiry into the activities of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly known as Anglo Irish Bank. There is the Fennelly Commission of Inquiry into the taping of phone calls to Garda stations. His government also set up the Murphy Inquiry into mother and baby homes and the O’Higgins Inquiry into the allegations of Garda Maurice McCabe. An inquiry has also been established into the shooting of Real IRA man Ronan MacLochlainn and another into the death of Gary Douch in prison custody.

There was also the Guerin Inquiry, which was connected to the other Garda inquiries. An investigation into the activities of the National Assets Management Agency in Northern Ireland is likely to be extended here.

And, of course, we had the Big Kahuna – the Banking Inquiry.

Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross and his Junior Minister Patrick O’Donovan unveiled another inquiry recently. They said it would be completed in 12 weeks. We asked at the launch/ press conference: ‘Given that Pat Hickey is in jail in Brazil, how much of a role will he play in all of this? How can you speak to Pat Hickey if he remains in custody for a prolonged period of time? Is it not Hamlet without the Prince?’

Mr O’Donovan replied: ‘Well, we want to be very sure in the first instance that we don’t in any way impact on any investigation that is happening in another jurisdiction and from the outset we have been very keen to point out that. There is a parallel investigation that is going on in Brazil, we don’t believe what we are establishing here will in any way impact on that.’

And they had been guaranteed full ‘cooperation from the Olympic Council of Ireland’.

Inquiries allow politicians to avoid answering questions. This investigation can’t compel witnesses to attend and can’t seize bank account details. As tribunals and inquiries were pursuing their questionable agendas, we had State agencies who did, in fact, have sweeping statutory powers to dispassionately investigate, to arrest people and raid offices. But they have no resources and no backing, and are given no respect.

The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement is the State’s main watchdog when it comes to investigating allegations of white-collar crime. It was operating without any in-house accountants for 15 months between February 2015 and May this year.

In 2014, when it had just one forensic accountant, its director said that it needed at least five more to be ‘credible’. A vacancy for a computer specialist has been open for nearly two years, while two senior investigator positions also need to be filled.

The ODCE prosecuted just three people in the District Court last year, with no proceedings at all launched in the Circuit Court.

The Garda Inspectorate said last December that the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation (the Fraud Squad) is ‘struggling to manage the demands placed on it’. Its IT system is not ‘fit for purpose’. The Inspectorate said the Fraud Squad had a ‘serious deficiency in capability’ and should be wound up. It said a new super crime agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, should replace it. I thought of that one – as a young lad at a tribunal hearing 16 years ago.