How do you solve a problem like Olivia?
HOW do you solve a problem like Olivia? A Fine Gael internal committee is looking into its heart to see how to do exactly that. Olivia Mitchell is the only member of the Dáil against whom negative findings were made in the Mahon Report. The party is determining whether to give a fig about the findings, to dispute them, or to show total respect for the conclusions of a body set up by the Oireachtas.
The tribunal found that when Mitchell was a member of Dublin County Council she inappropriately accepted a £500 political donation from the lobbyist, and star tribunal witness, Frank Dunlop.
Mitchell received the donation unsolicited in the run-up to the 1992 general election, in which she was a candidate. The inquiry found she should not have accepted the money. She knew Dunlop was lobbying hard for the Quarryvale project, which has turned out to have been a seething bed of corruption, although she didn’t know how corrupt the whole project had become.
“While the evidence would suggest Cllr Mitchell did not solicit the contribution, she nonetheless accepted it in the knowledge of Mr Dunlop’s close association with the project,” the report found.
As a result, a disciplinary committee of the Fine Gael party is deciding what’s to be done with Mitchell. One thing is for sure: The committee is as likely to be worried about the perception of its findings as it is in delivering natural justice to Mitchell, who has been a TD for the last 15 years.
In 2000, when Dunlop first began to sing about bribing councillors, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael set up internal committees to find who among their members had greased their palms. It turned out that both inquiries were nothing short of a joke, more concerned with being seen to be doing something than actually rooting out corruption or dodgy practice. Now the Blueshirts have another committee in place to clean up a mess. This one is relatively minor, particularly as Mitchell is not the power within the party she might otherwise have been.
Up until the “Night of Blunt Knives” attempt to unseat Enda Kenny as leader in June 2010, Mitchell occupied the frontbench. Then she got foursquare behind Richard Bruton when he made his move. And when Big Phil Hogan routed the rebels, Mitchell was one of those singled out for sacrificial revenge. There would be no goody bag for her once Fine Gael got in to office.
And so it turned out. Mitchell failed to be appointed to even a junior post, a state of affairs that in retrospect looks fortuitous. Bad and all as it is to have ministers trying to avoid tribunal lepers, imagine if one had been in government when the report was issued.
Mitchell sees herself as hard done by, and she may have a point. In the first instance, she is at the lowest scale of culpability according to the report’s hierarchy of blame.
Fourteen of the 32 councillors who were the subject of adverse findings were found to have taken a bribe. More were deemed to have acted in an “entirely inappropriate” manner. Mitchell was among those deemed to have acted in an “inappropriate” manner. It was accepted that she didn’t have her paw out to Dunlop. Her misdemeanour was to have taken the money when offered, despite the conflict of interest in accepting money from a man on a mission to turn the heads of councillors.
There was ancillary stuff as well, which was harmless, but spoke volumes of how Mitchell and others conducted themselves at a time when they were charged with planning the future of Greater Dublin.
Along with three of her Fine Gael colleagues Anne Devitt, Therese Ridge, and Mary Elliot, Mitchell made up the female contingent of the “two by four” club. The “two” males in the gathering were Owen O’Callaghan and Frank Dunlop. This informal club met several times — the tribunal estimated 10 at least 10 over six years — for a slap-up meal, the cost of which was picked up by the two boys.
Four women and two wealthy alpha males dining and fine wining might give the impression this was Dublin planning’s prequel to Sex and the City. Not a bit of it. The evidence given to the tribunal was that it was nothing more than a spot of fun, where political gossip was the staple.
Its unearthing, however, did show the whole planning process in a new light. The gatherings were a little too cosy. Five of the six who made up the club — the exception being Mary Elliot — had adverse findings made against them in Mahon, although none of the councillors were deemed to have specifically acted in a corrupt manner.
So what of Mitchell? Was she really any different from any of her colleagues at the time in accepting donations from Dunlop? The inquiry found that others such as Pat Rabbitte returned donations, but that probably had as much to do with his party’s stance on developers at the time rather than any personal distaste for, or suspicion of, Dunlop.
Mitchell, as with the vast majority of her colleagues in Fine Gael (and Fianna Fáil) described herself as “pro-development”. This term basically meant that one was willing to vote for rezoning at the drop of a hat in the belief that building was in general a good thing. Those who were “pro-development” took scant notice of recommendations from professional planners and just bulldozed ahead with rezoning.
Mitchell, for instance, described herself as being “in favour” of the Quarryvale project. She didn’t represent the area in question, west Dublin. She knew there was local opposition. She saw in 1991 that the local councillors who supported the project had been massacred at the ballot box. Planners had been opposed to the project. Yet she wanted the project to go ahead, largely on the basis of her “pro-development” stance. In this, she was not in the least unique.
That was the way things were done, largely on the basis that the councillors were empowered to rezone as they saw fit and would never have to account for their actions.
Mahon found nothing to suggest Mitchell was corrupt. The finding that she had acted inappropriately could just as easily have gone the other way. She may well consider herself unlucky, and she may hope the disciplinary committee come to the same conclusion.
However, while she wasn’t corrupt, the system was. Everything that emerged in Mahon reeked of a system in which many councillors saw themselves as above any conflict of interest on the sole reasoning they considered themselves to be of the highest integrity.
In Mitchell’s case, she saw absolutely no problem in accepting Dunlop’s money, despite the power vested in her to vastly enrich Dunlop’s employer at the stroke of a pen. Most, but not all, of her colleagues, felt the same. Those who questioned the system, such as Trevor Sergeant and Joan Burton, were shouted down and threatened.
It’s just unfortunate for Mitchell that her name popped up in relation to Quarryvale. Many of her erstwhile colleagues from the time might well reflect that, to quote a phrase, there but for the grace of God, go they.
