We may have voted for them but we sure as hell don’t deserve them

LIONS led by donkeys. It was a phrase first used to describe soldiers in the First World War and the generals who led them. It could apply to us and the asinine Government that leads us.

Except that the donkey is a harmless creature. A bit clumsy, maybe, and not the brightest. But most donkeys aren't dangerous. And our Government gets more dangerous by the day. We may have voted for it, but we sure as hell don't deserve it.

By far the more serious and telling incident of the week was the resignation of the highly-respected Ms Justice Mary Laffoy, and I'll try to deal with that in a minute. But the crass ineptness, compounded by arrogance, of Minister for Justice Michael McDowell (the word justice means as much in his title as it does in the Four Courts) deserves a few words first.

At the end of July he published a general scheme of a new Garda Bill not the actual legislation, but a broad outline. Buried in the middle of the outline was a provision which wasn't noticed at first, but when it was it drew an outcry.

It said that it would become an offence for any garda, or anyone employed by the gardaí to (without authorisation) "disclose or communicate during the term of his or her office or employment or at any time thereafter, any information concerning any person or body ".

The offence would be punishable by a fine of up to €30,000 or a five-year jail term, or both. This looked like a very sweeping provision.

However, there was a note attached to the section which said that "the precise scope of this provision and, in particular, whether there is a need to provide for exemptions, will be considered further during the drafting stage of the bill".

After a week of controversy, the minister confirmed that his intention was only to "prohibit four categories of contact between journalists and the gardaí, involving corruption, the invasion of privacy, compromising a trial, and endangering the security of the State". No journalist and no garda, indeed no citizen, could really object to that.

But between publishing the scheme of the bill and clarifying what he meant, the minister gave a series of interviews in which he left no doubt that he had evidence of corrupt and improper relations between the gardaí and certain journalists. He refused to reveal his evidence, claiming that he could be trusted to know what he is talking about.

Well, speaking personally, I don't trust a Minister for Justice who claims to know of specific acts of corruption and refuses to have them investigated. I don't trust a minster who makes unsubstantiated allegations that point a finger of suspicion all around the place. I don't think a Minister for Justice who behaves in so authoritarian and stupid a way should be left hanging around.

This is the guy who said Fianna Fáil couldn't be trusted with single-party Government. And we're supposed to trust him to protect our basic rights? At least we know that he won't have the bottle to really screw down on some basic rights the way his demeanour suggests he would like to at least not where Irish citizens are concerned. When the Garda Bill does become law, you can expect this particular provision to be well modified. But the rights of far more vulnerable Irish citizens do need to be worried about. Everyone who works in politics knows, because they've had the phone calls, that there are vulnerable, damaged and frightened people out there whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by the resignation of Ms Justice Laffoy from the Child Abuse Commission.

We are all indebted to the Sunday Tribune for getting hold of Judge Laffoy's letter and publishing it (hopefully it wasn't someone employed by the gardaí who leaked it!). The public interest in a case like this can only be served by honesty, and the Government's transparent attempts to suppress the judge's letter until they had cobbled together some kind of response was a kick in the teeth to the public interest. I don't ever remember a government of any hue having the brazen effrontery to refuse to publish something so obviously intended to be seen by the community as a whole.

THE reason they would like to see it buried is clear once the letter is read. And it takes some reading, because it is constructed in a highly painstaking, almost academic, way. But its import is all the more devastating for that.

The Government, by its actions and by its inactions, has fatally undermined the essential independence of the commission. They complain about the likely legal costs yet it took them two years to put a provision in law to deal with this issue. More seriously, they have spun out a story suggesting that the commission would take eleven years to complete its work. Yet many months ago the judge asked the Government to give her sufficient resources to work in four separate divisions. She was immediately asked by the Department of Education to justify this request (on behalf of the same Government that was going around muttering about delay!). In response she reminded the Government of the need to bring closure for victims of childhood abuse, many of whom are old and in bad health. A week after they got this response, the Government decided to review the mandate of the commission in its entirety. The judge makes clear that every promise of extra resources made by the Government was meaningless, and that her efforts to deal justly and efficiently with the huge caseload before her was met with a sullen and mean-spirited response from the Government. The Minister for Education contends that his department has co-operated with the commission, even to the extent of delivering half a million pieces of paper to them.

That's co-operation? What is this paper? In what way does it constitute evidence? Does the department have evidence of abuse in its possession? And if so, why has it been hidden in a basement all these years? In the past I saw some of the files of people who were sent to institutions. None of them contained evidence of abuse within the institutions they wouldn't, would they? But they were horrible documents all the same court orders signed by judges, confirming the incarceration of three and four-year-old children whose only crime was one parent had died or run away and the other couldn't cope.

They were in their own way evidence that these children had been abused by an uncaring system but that's not the sort of abuse the commission is investigating.

Snowing the commission under mountains of paper of this sort constitutes an attempt to bury the commission rather than co-operate with it.

We owe people who suffered horrible abuse this one chance to make sense of that shattered part of their lives. Instead of repaying that debt, we have condemned them to even more uncertainty for reasons that may be more sinister than we yet know, but are certainly entirely insensitive and incompetent. For that alone, our Government of donkeys should be deeply ashamed of themselves.