Kenny’s role in Callinan’s exit, gardaí in crisis and a dysfunction that starts at the very top

The Taoiseach now has a lot of explaining to do

ENDA KENNY’S spell as Taoiseach has often amounted to little more than government by catchphrase. Mr Kenny loves his little sayings, verbal comfort blankets designed to make us feel that the worst is over and a bright future beckons under the benign gaze of our political leaders. He has vowed so many times now to make Ireland the best little country in the world in which to do business that we have been bludgeoned by bluster into forgetting that it isn’t.

Mr Kenny has also introduced us to Paddy, a creature from the recesses of his vibrant imagination who stands in for inquisitive Irish people everywhere. ‘Paddy likes to know what the story is,’ he told RTÉ’s Richard Crowley on the night he was elected Taoiseach in February 2011, assuring the Irish people that he would find answers to all their questions about how Irish banks had brought down the economy.

It is on Paddy’s behalf, presumably, that the Taoiseach has been battering Sinn Féin over the head for the last few weeks in relation to the way it handled allegations of sex abuse by republicans.

Following the implosion of the Catholic Church, the banking system, Fianna Fáil and, if it isn’t careful, the entire political establishment, Paddy is curious about all sorts of topics and has more questions than he can deal with about how the country is run.

And so, in recent weeks, the Taoiseach has taken up the cudgels against Sinn Féin on his behalf, demanding that the party account for its past behaviour. One day, Mr Kenny might even get some answers.

One question Paddy would definitely like answered is what happened on that dramatic night in March of this year when Enda Kenny effectively fired the most senior police officer in the land.

Officially, Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan resigned, but he did so only after Kenny had dispatched Brian Purcell, the secretary general of the department of justice, to Mr Callinan’s home to talk to him about the illegitimate recording of phone calls at garda stations.

THE Taoiseach has consistently refused to answer any questions about his role in Mr Callinan’s resignation, and expresses disbelief that anybody would suggest that he had canned the Commissioner. He acknowledges that he spoke to the Attorney General Máire Whelan on the day before Mr Callinan quit, and that on foot of that conversation Mr Purcell was packed off to the commissioner to have a word in his ear.

But the Taoiseach refuses to reveal what Ms Whelan said to him, what he said subsequently to Mr Purcell or what message he wanted conveyed to the Commissioner. Paddy might want to know what the story is in relation to one of the most devastating clashes between government and Garda in the history of the State but for the moment, it seems, Paddy can whistle for it.

In his bid to avoid accounta- bility on this issue, the Taoiseach had a lucky break last week when the Fennelly Commission – set up after Callinan’s resignation to look at what happened and at the wider issue of unlawfully taped Garda interviews – let it be known that it would not now finish its work this year, as it had been asked to do. We’ll now hear from it some time in 2015.

The existence of the Commission has been vital to the Taoiseach’s continued refusal to speak on this issue.

Mr Kenny could have answered all of our questions on this issue in March when they arose, and not put a retired Supreme Court judge to the trouble of conducting an investigation.

But now, of course, that the judge is hard at work trying to establish the truth, the Taoiseach couldn’t possibly provide some facts lest telling the truth affect Mr Fennelly’s vital work.

Readers of a less generous disposition might well conclude from all of this that the Taoiseach is a bit of a cynic, refusing to answer questions about vital matters of justice in which he was intimately involved while laying into Gerry Adams for refusing to answer questions about vital matters of justice in which he was intimately involved.

The saga of Martin Callinan’s resignation is one of several controversies this year.

OTHERS include the alleged (though not proven) bugging of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, revelations by whistleblowers over penalty points, and the resignation of justice minister Alan Shatter, which have severely damaged morale in An Garda Síochána and dented public confidence in the force.

The findings of last week’s Garda Inspectorate report, which cast a harsh and uncomfortable light on Garda dysfunction, cannot be divorced from the kind of political manoeuvrings at the force’s highest levels that we have seen this year, and in years gone by.

The revelations in the report about the massaging of crime figures, the refusal by individual officers to take domestic violence seriously, the chaotic system of fingerprinting, detectives not trained in detective work, and inexperienced officers leading investigations into serious crime, as well as a host of other findings, cannot be put down solely to a lack of resources, although in many areas the force suffers from that problem too.

The laziness, apathy and bad attitude of individual officers which came across so strongly in the report are down to poor leadership.

With some exceptions, but not nearly enough, entry-level gardaí are led badly by sergeants, who in turn have to deal with apathetic inspectors, who themselves are receiving no proper guidance from superintendents.

That lax attitude about the rule and practice of law goes all the way up to the top and into cabinet, where ministers for justice reveal confidential information about political opponents on live television, and taoisigh sack commissioners and refuse to say why.

An Garda Síochána has always been a bit of a of a political football. Whether it was the local councillor asking an over-eager guard whether he’d like a ‘pint or a transfer’ when he came to take the names of afterhours drinkers, or huge numbers of badly trained officers being forced upon the public as part of grandiose election promises, the force has always suffered from a lack of proper boundaries between politicians and police.

The mysterious chain of events in which Enda Kenny met the Attorney General and then sent a flunkey around to the commissioner’s house to act as a political executioner is exactly the kind of dysfunction at the top that inevitably leads to the kind of dysfunction at the bottom we read about in the Inspectorate Report last week. The Taoiseach doesn’t seem to get that. Paddy would like to know why.