How Three Musketeers toppled scales of justice

ALAN SHATTER, a man of diminutive stature, seemed to believe his towering intellect was a licence for him to dominate the Department of Justice like a colossus. certainty that he is never wrong allowed the minister to cast aside any nagging worries about ‘checks and balances’.

former head of the Irish Prison Service, Brian Purcell, was appointed secretary general in July 2011, four months after the minister’s arrival in the department.

Mr Shatter had studied all of the senior officials seeking promotion but the diligent and dutiful Mr Purcell was best suited to the job.

Old hands feared that a grateful secretary general could be cast as Robin to the minister’s Batman, tackling real and perceived enemies. Checks and balances in the department were early casualties in this coupling of Shatter and Purcell.

But the scales got even more skewed when the Garda commissioner joined them and a troika of invincibles took control at the apex of Irish justice.

And these Three Musketeers, allfor-one and one-for-all, made their footnote in the history books this week courtesy of the Guerin Report.

TAXPAYERS may have to write large cheques to restore balance in the administration of justice. Sgt Maurice McCabe and former garda John Wilson paid an enormous price but the damage done to this State is unquantifiable. The Guerin Report chronicles Mr Shatter’s hubris and scandalous systems failures in his department.

Neither the minister nor his department initiated any independent analysis of the whistleblowers’ complaints. And they continued to undermine Sgt McCabe and garda Wilson, while accepting the Garda commissioner’s damning verdict on them without question.

There is no record of the department offering legal advice to Mr Shatter about two specific statutory duties that he failed to perform.

Mere civil servants offering legal advice to a master of jurisprudence like Alan Shatter would be like a watchmaker giving physicist Stephen Hawking tips on A Brief History Of Time.

But a minister’s conceit does not excuse his department’s failure to advise him on his statutory duty and its responsibilities to provide checks and balances. There has been ‘no independent investigation’ of ‘substantial and reasonably detailed allegations of significant misconduct’ made by Sgt McCabe in 2011 and 2012, says Guerin.

The Garda commissioner said that officials from the Department of Justice advised him not to apologise to the whistleblowers for calling them ‘disgusting’. We still don’t know why Mr Purcell failed to deliver an urgent letter from the Garda commissioner to Mr Shatter about the taping of phone calls in some Garda stations.

Still, his failure to deliver didn’t stop the Taoiseach from dispatching Mr Purcell to the home of Mr Callinan for his resignation.

Mr Shatter’s political shroud was dusted down when Enda Kenny cut him out of the loop after finding out about the taping of phone calls.

And the coup de grace was delivered last week with the arrival of the Guerin Report.

Two of the Three Musketeers will have more time to prepare for a commission of inquiry that will almost certainly report long after the obituaries for this Coalition.

At the time of writing, Brian Purcell remains in office but that’s another story about the folks that live on the hill in permanent government. LEO VARADKAR and other luminaries in Government are nearly as disappointed with the former president of the European Central Bank as those of us he made pay bondholders after the Irish banks collapsed.

The urbane Jean-Claude Trichet refused to appear before the Oireachtas finance committee’s anatomy of the €440bn banking debacle.

Yet not a peep when four other former senior Irish civil servants politely declined to appear before the Public Accounts Committee.

Former financial regulator Patrick Neary, former Central Bank governor John Hurley and David Doyle and Kevin Cardiff, former secretaries general in the Department of Finance, turned down the PAC’s invitation.

Maybe the four millionaire pensioners will turn up for the finance committee – or maybe not when it is so difficult finding members of the Oireachtas who did not say bad things about the banks. PRESIDENT Higgins made a deep impression on Rahm Emanuel when they met at Chicago City Hall on Friday. President Michael D’s elaborate body language made the Jewish mayor of Chicago believe he was in the company of an Old Testament prophet, according to aides.