This is a country where it’s never anybody’s fault
Gardaí abused penalty points system. No one to blame. Civil service misleads the Taoiseach. No one to blame. Tánaiste quits over McCabe scandal. She’s not to blame. So it appears...
WHAT a country. This week we learned that the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission is to drop its probe into the fixed-charge cancellation scandal because the cost outweighs the benefit.
We discovered that there were 74,373 cancellations of these notices; that one senior garda cancelled 744 fixed-charge penalty notices across 17 counties and that of the 442 members authorised to cancel these notices, one scrapped 46,161 over five years.
Moreover, cancellations were routinely carried out by certain members of the force without any attempt to discover why the charge was issued in the first place. ‘Cancelled’ was the reason given in 72% of cases. In other words, no reason was given at all.
‘Accountability’ was the buzzword earlier this week in the environs of Dáil Éireann as an election loomed.
But there is an extraordinarily strange lack of accountability when it comes to the gardaí, with the investigation into the fixed-charge notice scandal stopped after the figures have been revealed. The same lamentable state of affairs exists with the close to two million fake breath tests.
No person is to be held accountable as to how or why this colossal number of fake entries ended up on the Garda system.
What are those drivers – who paid their fixedcharge notices and took the penalty points – to make of it all when they see that so many others got off scotfree?
As ever, the suspicion remains that there is one law for the privileged and those who know people in power, and another for everybody else.
The past really is a foreign country when it comes to Garda accountability.
Following swiftly after accountability in the word stakes this week was ‘dysfunction’.
When Frances Fitzgerald resigned on Tuesday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar bemoaned the dysfunction at the heart of the Department of Justice and Equality (to give it its full title) and asserted that he and his Government were determined to end it. Minister after minister was trotted out onto the national airwaves to espouse the grim determination to clean up the dysfunction once and for all. B UT Fine Gael has been in office since March 2011. The Toland Report into the department dates to July 2014. Alan Shatter had resigned as minister just two months earlier. It is worth remembering that the main issues Toland, in its brief 20-page report, found were that the department operated in a closed, secretive and silo-driven culture; that it had significant leadership and management problems, and that it had ineffective management processes and structures. These resulted in it being unable to provide strong strategic oversight of key agencies both to hold them accountable and ensure their effectiveness was maximised. The key agency, of course, is the Garda Síochána. So if all this was known over three years ago, why is it only now, with a new administration in place, that the Government is determined to do something about its dysfunctional department?
What does it say about the department that it gave the Taoiseach misleading information, forcing him into an embarrassing Dáil apology? It really is extraordinary when the Minister for Justice has to tell the Dáil that it was a major challenge to obtain complete information from his own department in a timely manner and that information provided to him, the Taoiseach and then the Dáil, was proven subsequently to be inaccurate.
This speaks of a department that is practically out of control and seems to treat political representatives with derision, scorn and contempt. There seems to be an audacity within the department that it will face down attempts to exert any sort of political control over it. How else to explain the documents that were not originally given to the Charleton Tribunal and the misinformation given to the democratically elected Justice Minister and Taoiseach of our country?
There is more than a touch of the deep state about the department.
It has operated in a manner that ‘it knows best’ under Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil governments, and that needs to be tackled. Things weren’t helped by the announcement of the representative body for senior civil servants that its members would not be subjected to a political witch-hunt for the sake of political expediency and would not be scapegoated over department failings.
We are back to the idea of holding nobody to account for failings within the administrative system. This is a truly pathetic state of affairs as it conveniently puts all the blame on the system and none on individuals within it. It exists in the gardaí when it comes to breath tests and fixed-charge notices, and it exists in the civil service when it comes to giving politicians misleading information. It’s never anybody’s fault.
The resignation of Fitzgerald can only be a good thing if – and it’s a big if – the twin bedfellows of accountability and dysfunction are addressed in the proper manner. The omens are not politically good when we hear the Taoiseach say he expects to have her back in the front line of politics once the Charleton Tribunal reports on the McCabe affair – and presumably vindicates the former tánaiste. T HIS misses the pretty large point that there is a glaring contradiction at the heart of the McCabe affair that cannot be dismissed by Fine Gael at the tribunal. It is simply not credible to offer Sgt McCabe all the protections of the State – as the then Fine Gael-Labour coalition said it was doing in May 2015 – while at the same time knowing that the Garda legal team was going to raise vile and baseless allegations about him at the O’Higgins Commission, as the emails at the centre of the Government crisis this week showed.
That political judgment cannot be exonerated by Charleton.
The eminent Supreme Court judge might yet turn out to be the hero of the hour, however, if his plain-speaking demolition this week of the so-called garda whistleblower Keith Harrison is anything to go by.
Rarely, in Irish public life, have we seen such a clear-cut and damning report.
Whatever his report on the McCabe affair comes to, we can but hope that it will lead to proper public accountability and an end to administrative dysfunction.
It is the least that we, the citizens of this State, deserve.