No distractions, we want the truth about 999 calls fiasco
HELEN MCENTEE is like that three-cardtrick guy in the mideighties who used to keep all those people mesmerised, and short-changed, outside Semple Stadium in Thurles on Munster final days. His success depended on distraction, diversionary tactics and steers in the wrong direction.
Obviously, the Justice Minister is much too young to have personally witnessed such deliberate sleight of hand conducted in plain view, but judging by the way she’s now carrying on, somebody has briefed her about the benefits of similarly brazen tactics in the political sphere.
Twice in the past week McEntee has diverted our attention down entirely useless avenues – the first one that promises minimum jail sentences for really vicious murderers; the second that commits to a more efficient, fair and open system for appointing judges.
Both of them are political distractions to convince us all that something worthy is being done – and my problem is that McEntee would be much better employed using her time and energy on a much more pressing issue: why did gardaí betray our trust by dropping tens of thousands of emergency 999 calls made by frantic members of the public who felt they had no place else to go in their time of crisis?
THE minister knows full well that people convicted of murder get a mandatory life sentence. Technically that means the key is thrown away and those prisoners spend the rest of their lives locked up. In practice, however, murderers spend on average about 20 years in jail before being released on licence.
McEntee also knows that under the Parole Act, murderers can’t even apply for release until they’ve served at least 12 years in prison. So, all she has to do to ensure murderers do more jailtime is bring a simple amendment of the current legislation through the Oireachtas.
She could, in effect, impose a minimum sentence herself by requiring murderers do at least 15, 20 or even 25 years before asking for release. But that wouldn’t be Hollywood. No cameras, lights and action in that kind of boring work in parliament.
No. She has to pander politically to understandable public anxiety about particularly egregious killings; she has to grandstand and strut in a naked display of political populism. Leo’s anointed, shoo-in replacement thinks she knows where her bread is buttered.
Her proposals for a major reform of judicial appointments are also designed to win public support but could, in fact, turn into a constitutional nightmare.
Surely someone must have mentioned it to McEntee that the Government has absolute discretion on who exactly becomes a judge, an unqualified authority that comes directly from our little blue book, the Constitution. However, her proposals for a new Judicial
Appointments Commission clearly restrict the Government’s room for manoeuvre by requiring it to choose a judge from three candidates recommended by a new commission.
And, this is something that the minister and her Government colleagues are simply not entitled to do – no matter how much they may want to – without first changing the Constitution in a referendum.
McEntee’s proposed judicial appointments legislation conflicts
with the fundamental law of the State and, if enacted, is wide open to challenge for fettering the Government’s right to choose. In effect the proposed law sets aside a fundamental provision of the Constitution.
AND imagine the chaos that would arise if such a law were to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? Such a decision would have the direst consequences and would undermine the legality of any judicial appointments that may have been made under the proposed new law. Imagine the legal implications and confusion in such a situation about any decisions that had been made by any of the ‘new’ judges.
Meanwhile, the inquiry into the dropping of tens of thousands of emergency calls to gardaí, including one where a woman feared her rapist was returning to threaten her again, appears to have ground to a complete halt.
Derek Penman, the highly respected, retired Scottish police officer who was drafted in to investigate this scandal presented an interim report last November, but that’s really as much as we know.
Minister McEntee is aware of at least two disclosures on this matter by well-placed Garda officers. She also knows the extraordinary seriousness of the issues involved, and the gravity of the manifest Garda failures.
McEntee needs to ensure that we all know why the Garda emergency calls scandal happened – we need to know the depth and width of this terrible fiasco. Throwing shapes on sentencing and judicial appointments is no substitute for the real work of revealing to the public the true extent of a scandalous failure by gardaí who were supposed to be there, to serve and to protect, but weren’t.