Department of Justice has lost its values and needs to be torn down

THE Department of Justice has become an utter embarrassment to the State. An institution which should represent our finest values of justice, equality, and adherence to the concept of law and order, is now beyond redemption. Those values have gotten short shrift as we can see after a series of scandals involving the department over recent decades.

It is often the Garda Síochána which has borne the brunt of the blame for so many of the scandals, and rightly so.

But how many of the issues which have led to tribunal after tribunal, and inquiry after inquiry, have their genesis in the department?

How many of the problems that have led to an erosion in confidence in the police were known about, and ignored consistently, by senior officials in the department?

The Garda force reports to the Department of Justice and senior officers are in daily contact with their equivalents in the department.

Nothing happens in the force without the mandarins in St Stephen’s Green knowing about it. When it suits them, they have said they didn’t know; when things have gone well, they have tended to take the credit.

There have been many fine civil servants who have guided the department down the years, but there have also been many who have not been up to the job; who have simply been unseeing and incompetent.

Because the department has shrouded itself in secrecy for so long and, in effect, seen itself as above the law, it has been corrupted. The values it should stand for have been lost along the way.

Many fine ministers have found themselves unable to lead the department, others have used it for political purposes which have brought further discredit to it.

Frances Fitzgerald is a decent woman with a strong intellect, a minister who has been a role model to other female politicians, and, more recently, an excellent Enterprise Minister.

This affair could all have been avoided had the department instructed gardaí to do the right thing.

But who in the department was advocating the minister to do that? Or was she being advocated to do nothing?

The department has never been known to shy away from getting the Garda to do its bidding when it suits.

So why did it not do more to urge the minister to pick up the phone to the Garda Commissioner to ask what the hell was going on in the McCabe case?

The emails released last night do not make pleasant reading. They raise questions about the advice the minister was receiving.

But they also make it quite clear that the department needs to be torn down and we need to start again.

A department that served the State well during the low-intensity war waged by the Provisional IRA in the Republic in the 1970s and 1980s is no longer fit for purpose.

A new institution of State needs to take its place and save us from any more scandals of this type.

In the meantime, as we await such renewal, all eyes are on whether we can be saved from an unnecessary Christmas general election.