What value is transparency without accountability or responsibility?

We’re punch-drunk from scandals, especially those surrounding An Garda Síochána, writes Alison O’Connor.

COME out with your hands up. You’re being placed under inquiry. Anything you say or do will in all likelihood never be held against you; as long as you belatedly appear to say all of the right things the worst that may happen is a rap on the knuckles in a decade or so. It’s important, though, to lawyer up immediately.

How royally we are being blackguarded at the moment. We’ve got the opposite of fake news going on here, and the trouble is that our news is all too real, but nothing real is being done about it.

So much feels broken it’s getting increasingly difficult to find the correct language and emotional response to describe it. We did descend down the rabbit hole this week where our Government attempted to convince us that a scandal as epic as any we’ve encountered in our public life did not constitute anyone taking responsibility and resigning.

The fiasco surrounding what is essentially massive, monumental fakery on the part of An Garda Síochána, when it comes to official statistics, took centre stage. However if we cast our eyes around to other areas of our public life we see many similar and familiar stories. We see the same faces, or indeed agencies, overlapping and a similar pattern being repeated. We have so many investigations going on into various scandals, controversies, and imbroglios that identifying them all would be deemed too difficult, even for the most accomplished of pub quiz teams. Serious bonus points could be awarded for individually naming the poor unfortunate given the actual task of investigating each scenario, and their deadline.

We’re punch drunk from scandals, especially those surrounding An Garda Síochána. You couldn’t really accuse People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett of indulging in hyperbole when he spoke of our “increasingly failed State” in the Dáil on Tuesday evening. He made the observation during the questioning of Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald on what she knew — and when — on that latest Garda controversy.

On Wednesday we had the long awaited report into the management of finances at the Garda College in Templemore. Amongst many other things we learned that the money collected for doing the laundry of new garda recruits ended up being used for far more than detergent for socks, shorts and jocks. But the details hardly raised a hair. It’s just taken over a decade to get it all sorted officially. That’s how we roll here in Ireland.

It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to draw a comparison to the number of debacles now surrounding An Garda Síochána, to our health service. To be fair to the health service, their miscalculations when it comes to, for instance, patients on waiting lists, only appear to run to tens of thousands, even for them a million or so would be quite a stretch, unless we’re talking budget overruns. There is also a solid history of long-running investigations without consequences.

This is the health service that was described this week as being close to “total systems failure”, by the doctor who, against all the odds, managed to reform our cancer services a decade ago. Dr Tom Keane, former director of the State’s cancer control programme, believes our health system is at a tipping point. Dr Keane is based in Canada and it does take someone coming in from outside to point out the obvious to us.

Back in the day when he was over here sorting out the cancer services there were some suggestions, if I remember correctly, that he might hang around and sort out a few more health related matters. Ten years later, as the situation has significantly deteriorated, he must do a daily prayer of gratitude that he passed up that particular opportunity.

We have become inured to it all; we just seem to shrug our shoulders and accept it — no one ever takes responsibility for what goes wrong, even the monumental cock ups, or is made to do so.

Let’s look at the “Grace” case. It is an extraordinary account of neglect and abuse of a highly vulnerable child and highlights such dysfunctionality within our childcare services. No sign of responsibility been taken here either. As we’ve seen in more cases than we can recall, combing through the detail seems to take years; by the time we get to the truth, or some version of it, it always seems too little and too late.

Central to this case is Tusla, the agency charged with protecting our nation’s children. Hardly out of the news these days it recently gained further notoriety for becoming embroiled in the garda whistleblower, Maurice McCabe, controversy in the most incredible manner concerning a false allegation of sexual abuse.

Yes, we do have a tribunal to look into that extraordinary, multi pronged, whistleblower scandal. But we face the twin problems of not only needing it, but also not having faith in the outcome given the decades and millions lost on previous such tribunals. Talk about a double failure — lax control allows the scandals to happen in the first place and then no faith in the State controlled systems we have in place to investigate them.

Justice Peter Charleton did set a firm no nonsense tone when he held the opening session of the Tribunal recently. But one wonders what can one man, no matter how intent he is, achieve against a society’s entire way of operating. Will any heads roll, be they from the Gardai, the HSE or Tusla? From this vantage it appear unlikely.

For a further exhibit of the manner in which things operate, or how we allow them to operate, let’s look to the deal struck with religious orders which ran the institutions where children were abused. We were recently told the Comptroller & Auditor General — a rare beacon in terms of an Irish public body which actually comes up with answers and publishes them — estimates the orders contributed only 13% of the total cost of the scheme including a long running inquiry, redress and compensation at a total cost of €1.5bn by the end of 2015.

The religious order have contributed just €192m of that. Needless to say the overall cost is six times the original estimate of €250m. There is no one, even the most naïve and optimistic amongst us, that imagines the balance of those figures changing anytime soon. Who is responsible for this massive financial loss to the State? Will they be held responsible? Answers on a postcard please.

The figures and the implications here are epic, just as they are relating to the issues within the gardaí, with the health services, with our general approach to accountability, transparency and people taking responsibility. On and on it goes; apparently without end.