Three issues for Government – and election isn’t one of them!

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Monday was spent traipsing around Dublin and Kildare asking political leaders questions about three issues – two of them the recurring themes of Brexit and the confidence and supply agreement. And the third is the controversy du jour, the fall-out from the Charleton Tribunal – and, in part, the political hue and cry that essentially forced Frances Fitzgerald to take one for the team, and resign as Tánaiste and Minister for Justice last November.

But to get there you have to go back – to the first real formal investigation of whistleblower Maurice McCabe’s and the O’Higgins Commission which sat during 2015.

By that stage, officially, McCabe had been transformed from a persona non grata within the Garda to a person held in the highest esteem. Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan even said that – but O’Sullivan also had a quandary.

McCabe was a driven man. Over the years he amassed impressive dossier of Garda malpractice and incompetence. A lot of it was relatively minor (pointing to lazy guards) but some of it was major, including the failure to pursue protocols in relation to a dangerous man who went on to murder a woman in Limerick.

O’Sullivan accepted McCabe’s bona fides. But at the same time, he had made some serious allegations against senior Gardaí, who denied them. And as commissioner, she was also responsible for defending them.

It all revolved around the strategy that was adopted at the O’Higgins Commission. What was needed was to treat McCabe with soft gloves while protecting the reputation of her senior officers. It was kind of unworkable.

In any instance, McCabe was subjected to tough assertive questioning, with O’Sullivan’s barrister telling the Commission his instructions were to question not only his motivations but his credibility.

There was no doubt that the approach was not the right one. But somehow the leaks from the Tribunal, as Judge Charleton said, ‘transmogrified’ that approach into a horse of a different colour – a malicious campaign to down McCabe’s character by raking through the coals of that 2007 conviction.

The media got selective and one-side leaks and ran with them. O’Sullivan came under pressure for being two-faced – defending McCabe in public while seeking to destroy him in private. Of course, there was no strong basis for that, but nobody was in a position to contradict it, until Charleton.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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