The fab-four statement on white-collar crime sounds great but we need action, not blather

Is the Government ready to tackle age-old problem?

THE Janus-faced nature of the Government’s tortuous relationship with policing issues raised its ugly head again this week. On one side, we had the forwardlooking face with the triumphant announcement, by no less than four senior ministers, on Thursday that Ireland was finally getting serious about white-collar crime – the day after banker Tiarnan O’Mahoney was acquitted in the courts of both falsifying records and of conspiracy to destroy records.

On the other side, we had the backwardlooking face of the neverending saga of more records relating to the Garda breath test controversy. On Wednesday, the Policing Authority released its independent review of the falsification of the tests and revised upwards – by some 400,000 – the discrepancy between the Garda figures and what actually occurred.

According to the Policing Authority, close to a staggering two million false breath test figures reside in Garda records. The scale of the falsehood is staggering and the authority didn’t pull any punches noting that the problems in An Garda Síochána were ‘endemic’, ‘dishonest’, ‘unethical’, and offer a glimpse of what occurs when no one is watching.

Even more worryingly, the authority could offer no reassurance that similar issues did not infect other areas of operational policing, or give any guarantees that this was the end of the matter, or that such falsehoods would not arise again within the force.

The response of the Acting Garda Commissioner Dónal Ó Cualáin was to issue a collective mea culpa of sorts, noting that the authority’s report had found unacceptable failures in Garda ‘systems, processes, internal oversight, supervision, governance, management and culture’. What else is there, one could well ask? And this is the force that relies on public goodwill to essentially do its job.

But if we, the citizens, cannot be assured that the Garda is able to do its job, how can we rest assured the Government is taking white-collar crime seriously as it sent four of its political heavyweights out to announce a raft of measures?

The Tánaiste, and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Frances Fitzgerald, the Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan, the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, and the great hero of the Independent Alliance, and cronyism-buster par excellence, the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross unveiled a raft of measures that would, in Mr Ross’s words, improve Ireland’s international image for probity and end, once and for all, the old New York Times view of Ireland as the ‘Wild West of European finance’.

The fact that, uniquely of the four, Mr Ross was the one who used the pronoun ‘I’ when discussing the issue and how he bravely had been highlighting the need to ensure strong legislation and regulation to ensure that the rule of law applies clearly and fairly in every sector of society, tells us everything we need to know about where his priorities lie. The sweeping new laws, as the fearless four described them, are designed to make it easier to prosecute people for insider trading, planning corruption and bribery offences.

They also announced that there would be an overhaul of the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) – establishing it as an independent agency with extra resources.

After the fiasco of the collapse of the Seán FitzPatrick trial in May of this year – where the ODCE rightly came in for ferocious public and political criticism – this is clearly a good move. The question, however, is whether any or all of this legislation will make any significant difference. It seems to take this government the proverbial age to get things done, particularly in relation to white-collar crime. Over five-and-a-half years after the Mahon Tribunal issued its final report into corrupt payments to politicians in connection with the planning process some of its recommendations are, at last, to be implemented.

These include new laws which specifically target lobbyists who may seek to bribe influential figures on behalf of someone else and laws which make it an offence to make a payment to a third party who intends to use the money for bribes.

In March 2011, the then newly installed taoiseach, Enda Kenny, welcomed the report of that other long-running tribunal of inquiry, the Moriarty Tribunal, into payments to politicians noting that it reeked of ‘fanatical greed, obsessive attachment to power, and breathtaking attempts to acquire, use and access privilege’.

He went on to declare resoundingly that ‘for the sake of our democracy, and in the context of the national misery caused by weak and reckless administrations, and corrupt self-serving politicians, we must return both government and parliament to the people’.

While I’m not sure what exactly the point about returning government to the people even means, Kenny’s government went on to do precisely nothing about white-collar crime and made no effort whatsoever to implement any of the findings of the other tribunal.

Now that the Government has finally got around to doing something about white-collar crime – including signing up to an international transparency drive known as the Common Reporting Standard to counteract tax evasion which it should have joined back when it was first developed in 2014 – we can but hope that it resources the new ODCE properly.

It says it will and the fact that the agency will be independent of government will ensure that is the case. But we have been here before and seen very bad results. Back in 2007, the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, embroiled in the farrago of the Mahon Tribunal, stated 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 work properly.

When the FitzPatrick trial collapsed both Brendan Howlin and Mary Mitchell O’Connor stated that no one in the ODCE had asked for more resources since the Fine Gael/Labour coalition came to power in 2011.

Back in May, I wrote in these pages about how there were two Irelands when it came to crime: 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.

The Government’s proposals this week suggest it is determined to oversee a one Ireland approach. This is as it should be. It is the politics of action and should be commended.

But, until we see concrete results, the jury must remain out as to how effective the glamour announcement this week will be.