Government – Page 34 – Public Inquiry

Penalty points scandal: Only one certainty; nobody will be held to account

If allegations that up to 50,000 penalty points cases were illegally quashed by gardai over a three year period are true then the matter can be categoried as a major corruption scandal.

And because Ireland is an intrinsically corrupt state we can say with absolute certainty, and well before any investigation reaches a conclusion, that nobody will be charged, nobody will be held accountable.

We are already seeing the standard state response to such scandals.

Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan:

We’ve proved over the years that we’re well capable of investigating ourselves.

Just one word in response to this – Donegal.

Any allegation of impropriety at whatever level within the Garda is a matter of huge concern and that’s why it’s so important to allow the Assistant Commissioner and his team to get on with the business of examing these matters and reaching proper conclusions.

This is the standard ‘nobody should talk about this matter until the (long drawn out) investigation is complete’ (and forgotten).

With luck this internal Garda investigation will be completed sometime before the end of 2013. If its publication goes unnoticed by the media the matter will be quietly dropped.

If there is a media reaction another investigation will be initiated and so on it goes.

If any lessons can be learned from the examination when it is complete these will be taken on board.

This is another standard strategy to cover any wrong doing that may appear in the report.

The wrong doing can be ignored by simply stating that lessons have been learned and it won’t happen again. When it does happen again, as it inevitably will, the process is simply repeated.

Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar:

People need to have confidence in the penalty points system and we absolutely cannot live in a country whereby people can get out of anything because they know somebody.

The corrupt system of ‘getting out of anything through knowing someone of power and influence’ is an integral part of Irish culture and has been since 1922. That corrupt culture is the sole cause of our downfall as an independent state.

I’m confident that the Garda investigation is going to be thorough and I trust them to do that.

This is either the opinion of a fool or of somebody not really interested in getting to the bottom of this scandal.

The most hilarious and bizarre response comes from Conor Faughnan of AA Roadwatch who has seen the evidence first-hand.

I do not believe this is corruption, but institutionalised bad practice that has become custom and habit over the years.

This is an extreme example of denial which is very common in Ireland.

The mindset behind it is simple – If we call it (crime/corruption) something else then it’s all right, we dont have to deal with reality, happy days.

The priority is that it stops from now, that it does not happen any more, and that is a bigger priority then raking over the coals of individual cases.

Translation: If it stops now we’ll say no more.

This attitude only applies to people of power and influence. Ordinary citizens are, of course, always subject to the full and immediate force of the law.

The priority was to clean it up and if that was done that should be the end of the matter.

Translation:

If we studiously ignore what has happened we can pretend that it didn’t actually happen at all and hope that those involved will be more careful about being caught in the future.

RTE:

The scandal was ignored on Morning Ireland (10th Dec).

The programme did, however, give extensive coverage to a murder that occurred in Northern Ireland 23 years ago.

This lack of interest in allegations of major corruption was repeated on the News at One.

The scandal got a mention at the tail end of the programme but was very cleverly folded into a report on the annual Christmas road safety campaign where it became practically invisible.

Garda Ombudsman:

You would imagine that the much lauded Garda Ombudsman would have an interest in these very serious allegations of corruption within the force.

I rang the Garda Ombudsman Office to inquire if they were investigating the matter – they’re not.

Apparently they can only investigate matters that involve complaints from members of the public who have been directly wronged by a Garda or a matter that they deem to be in the public interest

I was informed that they were ‘monitoring’ the situation and would decide what to do after the internal Garda investigation was complete.

Other state agencies ‘monitoring’ or ‘investigating’ the matter:

Department of Justice
Department of Transport
Comptroller and Auditor General
Road Safety Authority

Now that a (secret) ‘investigation’ is underway and Christmas is almost upon us it is likely that the whole unsavoury matter will be long forgotten by the time the next, inevitable, scandal breaks.

As I wrote at the beginning, there is only one certainty surrounding this whole murky matter – Nobody will be held accountable.

Happy days are just around the corner

Former working class politician but now comfortable minister Pat Rabbitte was on the Claire Byrne Show yesterday.

He was not happy with one of the panelist who criticised members of his political class.

It’s not fair to use loaded language like ‘the Ministers who protect the banks’. Whether we like it or not we live in a market economy and our banking system is dysfunctional and unless we get the banking system up and working again we won’t be able to put people back to work.

Basic rates of social welfare are quite reasonable in this country in comparison with other countries.

Now Mr. Rabbitte has merely moved from being a peoples politician to the much more lucrative club of the ruling elite.

The political editor of the Irish Times, Stephen Collins, on the other hand, has clearly just arrived back from an extended holiday on Mars.

Here he is on this and the previous government’s record.

They’ve done almost 75% of what needed to be done to get out of the mess that we were left in. After this budget it will be up to 85%.

They’re very nearly there. We had so many prophets of doom who got so much air time demanding suicidal options like leaving the Euro which would have destroyed the country.

And to be fair to the previous government they managed to wrestle the whole thing around so I think it’s nearly there.

So…..all done. Happy days are… er…just around the corner.

Savita Halapanavar: A transparent and accountable inquiry?

The Galway coroner who will be conducting the inquest into the death of Savita Halapanavar, Dr. Ciarán MacLoughlin, was crystal clear.

The inquest would sit in early January. Will have over 30 witnesses and will run over a number of days.

It will be open, there is compellability of witnesses and they can be cross-examined.

We expect to have all witness statements taken by December 7th.

It will be accountable, transparent and we will get to the bottom of what happened

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If Dr. MacLoughlin is as good as his word then all the current and proposed ‘investigations’ will be unnecessary.

In Ireland, secrecy is always the knee-jerk response to scandal

Consultant obstedrician Peter Boylan does not believe there should be a public inquiry in the Savita Halapanavar case. He give two reasons:

Mr. Halapanavar is grieving for his wife and expected child, so he’s in a state of grief at the moment and that needs to be taken into account when assessing his response.

I dont think Mr. Halapanavar would agree with this patronising view.

If it’s a public inquiry it will descend into a bit of a circus because there will be misinterpretations of the evidence given which will be bandied about in the media.

Secrecy is always the knee-jerk response to scandal in Ireland.

In functional democracies like the United Kingdom public inquiries are the norm.

This is becasue functional democracies have checks and balances built into their systems. They have in place authorities that have the power to act independently of political power.

The Leveson Inquiry has just produced an excellent report within a few months and cost a mere £7 million.

British citizens from practically every level of society from ordinary joe soaps, to journalists, to movie stars right up to the Prime Minister himself were questioned in public, under oath.

The sky did not fall in and British citizens are likely to see some swift and real reform as a result.

In Ireland, there is no law enforcement authority with the power to act independently of the corrupt political system.

This fact lies at the core of every scandal in Ireland.

It’s the principal reason why people of power and influence are never held to account.

Susie Long is remembered

Great to see Susie Long being appropriately remembered.

In one of her final interviews she was asked by Miriam O’Callaghan.

If you had one message for the Irish health service and those who run it what might it be?

The health service should be for everyone equally, and that’s it. Everyone is entitled to a good health service; it shouldn’t depend on where you live or how much money you have in your back pocket. The health service is paid for by our tax money and so therefore we’re entitled to every service available that we need.

Róisín Shortall: A glint of honesty in the political sewer

It really is refreshing to listen to an Irish politician speaking with absolute honesty.

Róisín Shortall did not mince her words in response to an Irish Times report that two locations in Minister for Health James Reilly’s constituency were added to a list of places chosen for primary care centres on the evening before they were announced by the Government.

Here’s some of what this principled politician had to say:

He started off by looking after some of his colleagues in some of those additions, all of the fifteen would have been added on that basis. At the last minute slipping in another four, two of which were in his constituency.

This documentation gives the lie to the many convoluted excuses and justifications that Minister Reilly and other ministers gave in the Dail and elsewhere where they tried to claim that there was other criteria used, that he had some basis other than pure political patronage.

Here’s one of the convoluted excuses that our moronic Minister for Health expects intelligent citizens to believe.

One and one makes two and two and two make four but four by four makes 16 and not four and four makes eight and so it is with this. It’s a logistical, logarithmic progression, so there is nothing; there is nothing simple about it.

Shortall again:

I think it’s a matter now for the Government to decide are they going to actually deliver the kind of new politics that they promised or is it going to be business as usual, stroke politics that has done so much damage to this country.

On the same programme we had a representative from that old gombeen/stroke politics regime that has destroyed our country, Fine Gael TD Regina Doherty.

Doherty sees nothing wrong with Reilly’s moronic excuses.

I’m quite satisfied that the explanation I was given is believable and plausible.

This gombeen response is a carbon copy of the cowardly excuses mouthed by Fianna Fail gombeens when defending the liar Bertie Ahern.

There is very little hope for Ireland and its people for so long as politicians like Doherty are in power.

According to her website Doherty’s favourite film is the Godfather.

Appropriate, I would say.

Her favourite saying is:

What goes around comes around.

Let’s hope that applies to her when she next stands for election.

Copy to:
Róisín Shortall
Regina Doherty

Please Mr. Halapanavar, respect our tradition of cover-up and political cowardice

The Taoiseach’s appeal to Praveen Halapanavar to meet with the chairman of the inquiry team can be translated as follows:

Please Mr. Halapanavar, please go along with the way we do things in Ireland. We don’t know how to do public inquiries, we’ve never done them.

Please do this for me Mr. Halapanavar. I promise you will receive justice, if it doesn’t threaten my career or the career of my colleagues. If it doesn’t expose our corrupt body politic and if the HSE can be brought under control.

Please respect our long established tradition of cover-up, secrecy and political cowardice.

Fine Gael politicians take to the cowardice bunker

Cover-up, denial, delay, secrecy, missing/destroyed files and moving blame.

These are the usual strategies employed by Irish authorities in response to state scandal.

Every one of them has been used in the last week in a desperate attempt by state authorites to avoid acting on or taking responsibility for the Halapanavar tragedy scandal.

None of them have worked so we’ve seen a strategy that is rarely necessary – public cowardice by elected representatives.

No Fine Gael politicians has been available in the last few days as each and every one of them took to the cowardice bunker.

And in a perverse way, who can blame them.

This scandal is different from all previous scandals because in this case the world is looking on as our corrupt political/administrative system struggles to cover-up the scandal while trying to maintain the fiction that Ireland is a functional democracy.

The first strategy to fail was the attempt to pack the original investigation team with consultants from Galway hospital.

If this was not an international incident those consultants would still be on that team, beavering away in secret to ‘resolve the problem’.

It has been said, and I have little reason to disagree, that these people are of the highest integrity.

I say ‘little reason’ because they did, after all, agree to participate in what the rest of the world clearly saw as an attempt to influence the outcome of the investigation in the state’s favour.

If these people are so wonderful they should have immediately recognised the implications of the situation and rejected the invitation to participate.

If this was not an international incident the people of Ireland would have been told by the ruling elite to take a run and jump if they objected to the form of the investigation team.

The HSE/State once again refuses to take responsibility

Cover up, denial, secrecy, bureaucracy, non-accountability, endangering life, corporate arrogance, corporate ruthlessness, political weakness, political cowardice.

This is the first paragraph of a piece I posted in May 2007 regarding the disgraceful treatment of Rebecca O’Malley by the Health Service Executive (HSE).

Mrs. O’Malley was told that a lump on her breast was benign but it turned out to be malignant.

The error cost her 14 months in wasted time. She had to have a mastectomy that probably would not have been necessary if that time had not been wasted.

It turned out that 300 other women had also been misdiagnosed but the HSE had decided not to inform them thus putting their lives in danger.

When Mrs. O’Malley expressed concern she was urged by the HSE not to go public.

She agreed on condition that an independent investigation be initiated. The HSE were lying, nothing was done.

The failure of the HSE to act forced Mrs. O’Malley to assume responsibility for the endangered women. She successfully forced the HSE to act by going public.

Five years on Praveen Halapanavar, husband of Savita Halapanavar, was asked why he had gone public after his wife died.

Because there was nothing happening after two weeks.

Mr. Halapanavar has assumed responsibility for dealing with this disgraceful scandal because the Irish State has effectively refused to do so.

Category: Government