Feckers

by John Waters

  Or so at least it seemed, if you had the misfortune to be listening to the radio or could not avoid passing in the vicinity a television set. All day long they kept the seats in the broadcast studios warm for one another as they came to speak about watching the Queen of England in Dublin with tears in their eyes. You would think it was the first time a British monarch had caused Irish people to cry. They called her ‘The Queen’. They talked about their humility in the face of this great occasion. They talked about how surprised they had been by their own emotions, about how tolerant they felt, and humble. They talked about the way she had smiled at them, and they had clapped her to the rafters for smiling at them. They said it was a historic moment, a sign of ‘our maturity as a nation’, how it marked a new point of departure in our ‘shared history’ with ‘our nearest neighbour’. It showed, they said, that we had ‘finally transcended narrow nationalism’ and taken our place among the nations of the Earth.

  But it was not just one day, or even two. For four long days there was no rest and no escape from it. They talked about the way she had waved at them, as though waving at people was not her job and she had not been doing it for nearly seventy years. They parsed and analysed her laying of a wreath in the Garden of Remembrance, comparing it to the way she might normally have laid a wreath in a different place on a different occasions. Had she bowed lower than usual? Definitely, they thought.

  Dozens of witness, humble and tolerant, came forward to tell how some relative of theirs, an aunt or uncle, had gone to England in the 1940s or 1950s and been given work there, or encountered social democracy, or got a smile from a passing man in a bowler hat. The implication was that there were no jobs, social democracy or bowler hats to be found at home. Everyone was too humble and tolerant to observe that the reason for there being neither jobs nor social democracy at home was because our bowler-hatted ‘nearest neighbours’ had stamped all over Irish civilization for eight hundred years.

  Half of Dublin was closed off and inaccessible for the duration. The ‘ordinary’ people were not invited, although some of them turned out anyway to give the Queen someone to wave at. One woman on the radio told how her sister was out jogging with friends in Phoenix Park and the guards had asked them to wave at the Queen as her Land Rover drove past because there was nobody else around to do it.

  The only visible dissent was from the toothless irredentists from Eivigi, who rampaged briefly, dressed in Man-U T-shirts, displaying their indifference to royalty and irony in equal measure.

  In Cork, Elizabeth, buoyed up to find herself in a place once called ‘Queenstown’, broke away and spoke to some ‘ordinary’ people. The commentators in Dublin wept and wailed. What humility everyone was showing. What maturity!

  At a State dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle, the Queen of England spoke about the ‘painful legacy’ affecting Ireland and Britain. She spoke about ‘the complexity’ and ‘the weight’ of ‘our history’. She spoke, too, about the importance of being able ‘to bow to the past but not being bound by it’.

  She said that it was ‘a sad and regrettable reality’ that through history ‘our two islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. The events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured, or their families.’

  ‘With the benefit of historical hindsight’, she said, ‘we can all see things we wish had been done differently or not at all’.

  It was as though the eight hundred years had been a minor prang at the traffic lights and both parties had shaken hands and agreed to do their own repairs.

  The Dublin elite, speaking for the whole country, cooed and oohed. They talked about the way the Queen of England had pronounced five words in the Irish language, ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde’, ‘like a native speaker’ causing the President, who was normally a sensible woman, to go ‘Wow!’

  It was as if they had always suspected Queen Elizabeth’s great love for the Irish language and, now, here was the proof of it for all to hear! Listen! She is speaking our awful, unworthy language, the one we hate and which once her predecessors had tried to persuade us to abandon in our own interests! What tolerance! What humility! No one was impolite enough to remark on the fact that Queen Elizabeth had avoided using the word ‘ocras’.

  One newspaper carried the headline, ‘Friends and Equals’, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that ‘equal’s’ feel no necessity to declare themselves as such, but nobody voiced such an intolerant thought.

  Everyone went home, tired but happy, self-confident, humble, tolerant and mature. How wonderful it was that, after eight hundred years of our insubordination and disrespect, the Queen of England had come to forgive us.

  The Cromwell family was not represented.

  Master James Flynn

  Just a few short years into the long-running Irish obsession with the tribunal of inquiry, one James Flynn, in his role as Taxing Master of the High Court, caused a volcanic eruption of sanctimony in Irish politics. Awarding costs to the Haughey family for their legal expenses in challenging some decisions of the Moriarty Tribunal, Master Flynn described tribunals as ‘Frankenstein monsters’ and ‘Star Chambers’.

  The leader of the Progressive Democrats, Mary Harney, in her capacity as Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, declared the comments ‘clearly offensive’ to the Oireachtas and judges presiding over tribunals. The Attorney General, Michael McDowell, conveyed the government’s ‘deep concern’ to the President of the High Court. Master Flynn was pistol-whipped to his knees and compelled to utter an abject apology.

  At the time, some people thought Master Flynn might have a point. As the Moriarty and Flood tribunals meandered on, and the Irish people muttered into their pints and cappuccinos about the costs to the public purse and the dizzying enrichment of leading members of the legal profession, it seemed not improbable that the nation might yet come round to something along the same view. Little did anyone know then that the tribunal farce was really only beginning.

  Notwithstanding Master Flynn’s observations, it was stretching credulity somewhat when, some years later, the businessman Denis O’Brien emerged to complain that the Moriarty Tribunal was trying to stitch him up. O’Brien and the former Fine Gael communications minister Michael Lowry stood accused of having readied-up the 1995 process for allocating the second national mobile phone licence, controversially awarded to O’Brien’s company, Esat Digifone.

  O’Brien protested to anyone who would listen, and many who would not, that Moriarty had made up his mind on the issue before his deliberations began. The public vacillated between half-supporting the tribunal and half-believing O’Brien. This was this widespread strange doublethink whereby it was permissible to grumble about the lawyers’ fees and the slowness of the process, and yet not to consider that any deeper criticisms might be valid. Many people thought O’Brien was engaging in a PR stunt to prepare the public mood for the worst when Moriarty delivered his final report. But more than a few were impressed by the vehemence with which he made the case for his innocence of any wrongdoing.

  Several times, as the apparatus of the tribunal lurched and creaked its way to a final conclusion, Justice Moriarty was forced to acknowledge significant errors in his preliminary findings. With the investigations coming to a close in 2010, it seemed likely that, arising from the evidence of a Danish consultant called Michael Anderson, the tribunal might be in serious difficulty. Anderson had radically challenged some of Moriarty’s key preliminary findings. And, since Anderson had been a key observer and overseer of the licensing process, it was difficult to see how his evidence could be circumvented.

  In March 2011, the Moriarty Tribunal at last delivered its final report. It had been 14 years in gestation and, depending on which figures you adopted, had cost something between €150 million and €300 million.

  The tribunal report told the Irish people, albeit at considerabl
y more length (more than 2,400 pages) that, well, we know what we know. Lowry and O’Brien were deemed guilty as charged. In substantiation of its allegedly damning central conclusion in respect of the most serious charge it had to deal with – that the 1995 awarding of the country’s second mobile phone licence to Esat Digifone resulted from an intervention by Michael Lowry – the report suspended a flimsy thread of logic between public prejudice and the known circumstances, padding out its case with rhetoric and speculation. The report got around the seemingly intractable difficulty of Michael Anderson’s evidence by the simple process of ignoring it.

  The report’s conclusions were in many instances no more than the tabulation of suppositions and suspicions, assembled, often selectively and tendentiously, as though with a view to seeking a successful prosecution. It was not really a judgment – more like the opening statement of the prosecution in the court of public opinion.

  The centrepiece of Moriarty’s logic was an interpretation of what had occurred at a meeting between Lowry and O’Brien in Hartigan’s public house on Leeson Street, Dublin, on 17 September 1995. Both men denied they had discussed Esat Digifone’s licence application in that meeting, but the tribunal decided that they must have done, so therefore they did. In this complex edifice of contention, there was a discernible tent-pole reliance on the somewhat dubious reputation of Michael Lowry, who had previously been caught out in tax evasion and other matters.

  The Moriarty Report, however, plopped readily into a condition of public opinion which had latterly become rampant with rage on account of a general sense that politicians, bankers and business people were all ‘at it’ and that, therefore, any allegation of graft or corruption was likely to be true. Moriarty and his report were guaranteed an easy passage in the court of public opinion, which was prepared to overlook all previous reservations about tribunals now that another pair of targets had been dragged to the stocks.

  In terms of general public attitudes to tribunals, this outcome was somewhat against the run of play. Some months earlier, the Supreme Court had issued a strong reprimand to the former chairman of another long-running tribunal, Mr Justice Flood, on account of his selective editing of the evidence of a key witness, James Gogarty. Overturning Flood’s decision to disallow the costs of two businessmen, one of the judges said that Flood had concealed ‘without justification’ important evidence relating to Gogarty’s credibility. ‘It is chilling’, Mr Justice Hardiman said, ‘to reflect that a poorer person, treated in the same fashion by the tribunal, could not have afforded to seek this vindication’.

  A decade before, James Gogarty, since deceased, had been a national hero – the cantankerous old whistle-blower who would come to claim the scalp of a former government minister, Mr Raphael Burke, jailed in 2005 for tax evasion. In return for his testimony to the Flood Tribunal, the State gave Gogarty indemnity from prosecution and paid his legal costs. Burke memorably called Gogarty ‘an assassin in the middle of the night’. Gogarty retorted: ‘I’ve been insulted by experts and this guy doesn’t rate.’

  In a strange and incongruous way, the tribunals seem to have gone hand-in-glove with the mentality of the Celtic Tiger. Most of them were established towards the end of the 1990s, partly as the result of pressure arising from various revelations suggesting corruption by politicians and others. For a decade and a half, the tribunals created vast amounts of material for journalists and mimics who relayed the proceedings to a nation increasingly in the grip of self-satisfaction. It was a pantomime to accompany the hubris of sham prosperity.

  The very existence of the tribunals in the boom years suggested also that Ireland was doing something radical about corruption. Few remarked on the inconvenient circumstance that Fianna Fáil, the party most likely to come under scrutiny in this connection, had readily agreed to the tribunal mechanism. One way of describing what happened is to say that Flood, Moriarty et al. enabled Fianna Fáil to continue in office for those fourteen disastrous years between 1997 and 2011 by functioning as lightning rods for any inconvenient allegations that might crop up along the way. The standard mantra, ‘It’s a matter for the tribunal’, enabled any potentially damaging accusations to be rendered safely to earth.

  The tribunal of inquiry, in other words, was Irish society’s greatest discovery of the 1990s, a perfect device for media and for the new breed of politician to carry on the various kinds of pretences that enabled public opinion to be appeased while business continued pretty much as usual. Tribunalism allowed us to dig up the past in a selective way, so as to dramatize our imagined ‘progress’ without admitting what was really at the root of our collective ill-health. Just as it suited Fianna Fáil and its various junior partners to have the tribunals acting as a kind of sin-bin for inconvenient questions about political chicanery, it suited the society as a whole to create the impression that the war against corruption was being waged without fear or favour. Meanwhile, the bankers and developers got down to making some serious hay.

  As the whole charade drew to an ignominious conclusion, it became increasingly clear that the only real benefit of the tribunals was bestowed on lawyers, who received fantastic sums of taxpayers’ money to create enough hot air to send a balloon to the moon. The alleged ‘money trail’ in the phone licence saga – the amount of money allegedly paid to Lowry by O’Brien – was about €550,000, or 2 per cent of the amount earned by the top three senior counsel working for the Moriarty Tribunal.

  The mechanism whereby the retraction was extracted from Master James Flynn was instructive in its orchestration. Key players with vested interests immediately began whipping up pressure for sanctions. Politicians like Mary Harney and Michael McDowell, who had come to power by accusing others of moral failings, made solemn statements of their concern. Attacks were launched by journalists, whom tribunals have made into stars. Once it was announced that the Attorney General had conveyed the government’s ‘deep concern’ to the President of the High Court, Master Flynn’s climb-down or removal was a matter of time. In the end, he capitulated and apologized, and the veil once again fell down on one of the truly great scandals of Irish life.

  It was inevitable, given the set-up he was fingering, that Master James Flynn would be made to eat crow. If his remarks were allowed to stand, other public servants might take to speaking their minds, and the public might have been enabled to see behind the veil of bullshit that protects the true nature of political processes.

  He should have stood his ground, should Master Flynn, for few things that have been said in the recent history of Irish public life were as correct and as perspicacious as those remarks of his about Frankenstein monsters and Star Chambers. Had we allowed ourselves to listen to and act upon his analysis, we might not have become quite as distracted as we did with our own smug sense of probity, and might have seen the real tsunami coming before it swept all our self-satisfaction away.

  Fintan O’Toole

  In the three-year build-up to the 2011 general election, there was a growing sense of radicalization in Irish society. It is true that the focus of much of the exploration was dismayingly narrow, and the energy behind it the product of an uncritical and often selective rage. But still, there was the possibility of the crystallization of Irish self-awareness in a moment of resolution and constructive hopefulness, perhaps even a political initiative of some sort.

  One by one, the great institutions of Irish life had fallen into disrepute: the Catholic Church, the banking system, the apparatus of government, the European ‘project’ and the political party system. There had been scandals affecting An Garda Síochána and the business community. Through the second half of 2008 and into 2009, every day seemed to bring further bad news. The Irish people contemplated the extent of the confidence trick that had been perpetrated upon them. Their blind faith in a political/economic system driven by the avaricious desires of the few, rather than the modest needs of the many, had delivered Ireland into a degree of perdition that even the most morose of Jeremiahs had failed
to predict. By 2010, the Irish people had become so shell-shocked that even the arrival in November of the International Monetary Fund was, by the time it happened, something of a relief.

  Out of this dismal picture emerged the unspoken possibility that everything might be persuaded to change, if only because everything had to. As 2011 dawned, it seemed that all was set, at last, to change utterly. For more than two years, the incumbent Fianna Fáil/Green coalition government had resisted innumerable calls to allow the Irish people a say in the drift of some of the most calamitous events in Irish history. Then, an announcement by the Green Party of its intention to withdraw from government in early 2011 was followed by a series of slapstick events that led, on 1 February 2011, to the announcement of the general election.

  For a brief moment it seemed that anything might happen. As the public waited for the election date to be announced, the mood was strangely subdued. It was already clear that the two government parties would be routed in the coming poll. But it was also obvious that there was no great stomach for the most obvious alternative: some kind of coalition between Fine Gael and the Labour Party.

  There had been rumours for some time about a new political movement, gravitating mainly around a handful of media personalities who had been vocal in criticizing the policies and performance of the outgoing government, identifying the nature of Irish political culture as the key factor in the national undoing. Over the previous couple of years, journalists like Fintan O’Toole, Shane Ross and David McWilliams had been delivering fiery speeches to large gatherings all around the country, affirming that they were as mad as hell and a change was gonna hafta come. Then, as 2011 dawned, it was whispered that these people were meeting in smoke-free rooms to discuss the possibility of snatching the steering wheel from the political establishment that had driven us into the abyss. In the Dáil, Mary O’Rourke, the Great Irish Mammy of one of Ireland’s oldest political dynasties, spoke mockingly of ‘wonderful gurus standing in what one could describe as posh areas’. The Irish people could hardly wait for this to happen so that they could give Mary the bum’s rush.