State’s foot-dragging would not be tolerated on the hurling pitch

WELL, it’s not exactly hurling, and that’s for sure. This country continues to endure the trauma of the most enormous split personality with our great national sport of hurling characterised by rapid-fire, no-nonsense, back-ofthe-net stuff, while State inquiries are conducted at a glacial pace, slow beyond patience, the direct opposite.

The most recent examples of such unconscionable delay emerged this week. The first is the ongoing State inquiry, commenced in 2017, into how Grace (not her real name), a young woman with intellectual disabilities, was allowed to remain in a foster home for nearly two decades despite allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

The second is a Garda inquiry lasting almost four years into how one of their own gave an unclaimed push bike to an isolated man during the pandemic. Mass murders would have been sorted sooner.

We’ve known for decades, certainly since the notorious and tragic Brigid McCole poisonedblood case in the 1990s, that the State operates a policy of deny and delay, even in circumstances where the ‘enemy’ – the person taking them on – is seriously or even terminally ill. This is a cruel and persistent policy of the State waiting things out and hoping the problem simply dies off.

THERE’S a whole battery of other inglorious examples of inquiries being delayed, but the Grace inquiry is by far one of the most egregious. EIGHT years after then senior counsel Conor Dignam, now a High Court judge, recommended an expeditious inquiry (that must have caused quite a chuckle in Government Buildings), the investigation is still dragging on.

It’s little wonder former junior minister Finian McGrath who set up the inquiry all those years ago accuses the Government of breaching obligations under the UN Convention for people with disabilities. Tragically, such criticism will make no difference at all to either the political establishment or the permanent Government, who, if they do anything at all, will simply shrug it off as a cost of doing business.

It’s impossible to understand how such unacceptable delays are allowed. Is there nobody in the relevant Government department with responsibility for overseeing the progress of inquiries like the one into Grace? It appears not, and we all know why. Such an appointment might work, and inquiries would conclude in a timely manner. They won’t be having that.

It was in June 2020, as the full tragedy of the Covid pandemic was being revealed to the world, that crack Garda detectives recovered a lost, found and unclaimed push bike from an elderly man to whom it had been given by a garda after the man’s previous chariot became unusable. Detectives also searched the garda’s home, presumably with warrant in hand. Talk about overkill.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has overall responsibility for what happened next; incredibly, the garda’s failure to fill out the required paperwork got him suspended for more than three years to last August, and sparked a probe by specialist gardaí from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And then poor Drew wonders why almost 99% of the 11,000 rank-and-file gardaí have expressed no confidence in him.

You don’t have to be a human resources guru to know what such ‘disciplinary’ action in this matter has done for the mental health and wellbeing of the garda involved, and for the morale of the wider Garda membership. Little wonder they’re leaving at an unexpectedly high rate and that recruitment of new gardaí is proving so difficult.

The awful treatment of patients at Limerick University Hospital, despite the government and the HSE being on notice of an ageing and larger population for at least five or six years, is another illustration of a sloth-like response to everything in this country.

IT MAY be humorous to imagine how the likes to Ger Loughnane or Brian Cody would react to such contrived laziness and lethargy as always applies to inquiries involving State bodies. We won’t even mention Davy. However, such delays are, in fact, not funny at all. Quite the contrary; they amount to a blatant denial of justice that offends the principles of decency, fair play and accountability. It’s shameful.

Now Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says that the upcoming Covid inquiry will be both comprehensive and not assign blame, an inbuilt contradiction that clearly indicates he’s taking us all for fools. One thing we can count on, however, is that the Covid inquiry will not conclude in a timely manner; we will not be told in the short-run how thousands of our fathers, mothers and grandparents died alone after being gathered together in nursing homes riddled with the disease.

Think 2030 at the earliest for any final report.