Conspiracy of neglect
The Seánie FitzPatrick trial collapsed this week because of an insidious and wilful culture of under-resourcing the State’s white-collar crime watchdog. It’s a...
THERE really is no place like Dáil Éireann when it comes to howls of righteous indignation. This week our national parliament was full of the guttural growls of our political class, both Government and opposition, bemoaning the effective collapse of the trial of Seán FitzPatrick after the judge in the case directed the jury to acquit the disgraced banker.
Our Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, used his Dáil pulpit to maintain that a minister performing in the way the hapless Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) did in this case would face instant dismissal. This is the same Taoiseach who, on coming to office, said he would publicly publish his own grades of his ministers and sack those who were under-performing. Six years later, we still await these grades.
In sombre tones Kenny stated that the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mary Mitchell-O’Connor, had sought a report from the ODCE on the outcome of the trial, including the role of all the professionals involved. The emphasis on professionals is practically hilarious as this was most definitely amateur hour for the public service.
Other members of the Government rowed in, also demanding answers from the ODCE. The two Fine Gael leadership contenders were outraged, with Simon Coveney almost plaintively noting that the ODCE ‘seems to have made a mess of this’. Taoiseach-inwaiting Leo Varadkar seemed equally sad, lamenting that legislation surrounding ‘socalled white-collar crime was not robust enough and that the workings of the ODCE needed to be examined’.
On the opposition benches the target was Mitchell-O’Connor, who was rounded upon by all shades of political opinion, with demands that she do something about the whole sorry saga. Her response was that classic Irish tactic: the seeking of a report.
Where, one might ask, in all this outrage were the calls for the Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, to do something? While the ODCE comes under the auspices of Mitchell-O’Connor’s department, this was still, after all, a criminal trial. It might have had all the appearances of a civil case, but this was a serious criminal matter and a man’s liberty was at stake.
NEVER mind that FitzPatrick has become the poster boy for all that was wrong in Celtic Tiger Ireland and is blamed by many for almost single-handedly causing the economic crash. He, like all Irish citizens, was entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Instead, he was the victim of a biased and partisan investigation by the ODCE which sought to build a case against him to the extent that it ignored any evidence of potential innocence. As the court of public opinion had already convicted him, the ODCE, it seems, was happy to follow suit.
It might not be fashionable to call the remarkably self-satisfied FitzPatrick, the man who slept soundly in his bed on the night of the bank guarantee, a victim of anything. Those pictures of him smugly walking away from the court will certainly stick in the craw of many still struggling to eke out a living in postCeltic Tiger Ireland, where austerity remains a byword for how many people live their lives. But in this case, victim is undoubtedly what he is. The FitzPatrick trial is curious on many levels, but one crucial question that needs to be answered by the ODCE, in the report Mitchell-O’Connor has demanded, is why the chief investigator in the case was appointed when he had no previous experience in relation to prosecuting indictable offences.
After all, the FitzPatrick case was clearly going to be the most highprofile of the lamentably few white-collar trials there have been in Ireland over the course of the last number of years.
In that context, one would have thought that the ODCE, the gardaí and the Director of Public Prosecutions would have invested any amount of resources to ensure that they had a watertight case all along the route from investigation to trial – and that our government would have made sure they had those resources. Clearly not.
A decade ago, our then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, at the height of his prowess and on the verge of winning his third general election in a row, stated that the ODCE would have to wait in line like everyone else when its chief executive had the temerity to ask for extra resources to allow it to do its business properly.
For Ahern, then embroiled in the farrago of the Mahon tribunal, the work of the ODCE was not unimportant. It was simply a matter of his government prioritising at a time when resources were becoming scarce.
This, in essence, sums up the attitude of the political elite to white-collar crime. It’s important, kind of, but not so important that they would do anything about providing proper resources for those whose job is to police and investigate it.
GO BACK a decade earlier, and we get a prime example of what the State can really do when it wants to be effective in terms of crime. The public outrage that followed the death of Veronica Guerin in 1996 forced the State to act in relation to violent gangland crime.
The formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau and a whole host of auxiliary legislation specifically targeting the John Gilligan crime gang proved enormously successful in taking them down.
That same attitude simply does not exist when it comes to whitecollar crime and the private influence that has long riddled the public policy process, as seen by evidence presented to the Mahon and Moriarty tribunals.
The result is a conspiracy of neglect when it comes to attitudes to white-collar crime.
Politicians are outraged when they read of the antics of FitzPatrick and other Anglo directors.
They fulminate in the Dáil about white-collar crime. They state, as both Brendan Howlin and Mary Mitchell-O’Connor did this week, that no-one in the ODCE had asked for more resources since the Fine Gael-Labour coalition came to power in 2011.
This is the politics of reaction and neglect. The result is an insidious, if not wilful, decision to under-resource any institution that may damage, through robust actions, the very State institutions they are meant to police.
What this State really needs is the politics of action. The shrug-ofthe-shoulder attitude that the political class have taken towards the whole banker class and those suspected of white-collar crime needs to be ditched.
Civic duty demands that it be replaced by a State that puts its full resources into ensuring that all citizens of this country are treated equally when it comes to the investigation of criminality in all its forms.
Otherwise, we will be all be guilty of perpetuating the reality of the two Irelands: the mythical one that claims to represent all citizens, and the real one that places a certain class on a pedestal from which it seemingly cannot be brought down.