The star chamber is replacing our democratic system of government

LIKE myself and the wider world, you may have been under the illusion that this country was democratically run by the Government on a cabinet basis.

Instead, it comes as a startling surprise to learn that the Government is run like a court of star chamber which has now abrogated, or taken over, the role of the judiciary.

Not just the judiciary, but it considers itself to be the country’s jury as well, whereby anybody it does not like, and against whom there’s nothing to build a criminal case, can be convicted by our Government.

In the Wild West it was called a lynch mob. Here, in 21st century Ireland, it’s called a coalition of Fianna Fáil and the PDs. Both have one thing in common - the cowboy!

Frank Connolly may not actually have been strung up, but he was hung out to dry by the Government, acting in the most outrageously undemocratic fashion.

The CIA’s covert practice of kidnapping and flying suspects to third countries where they allegedly torture them is called ‘extraordinary rendition’.

What the Government did in the case of Frank Connolly was overt and simply extraordinary.

Mr Connolly has been charged with absolutely no offence, yet he has seen funding of the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) withdrawn by Chuck Feeney whose charitable organisation, Atlantic Philanthropies, was its main financial backer.

Which means that funding for the probe into the €30m site for Thornhill Prison will probably dry up, too.

It seems that Chuck Feeney hired a private investigator to look into the allegations surrounding the supposed covert trip to Colombia. The investigator, from Risk Management International, told Atlantic Philanthropies that the gardaí had nothing on passports, according to the Irish Times, and that the CPI was considered by security contacts to be an “august body.”

Is it just a coincidence that Connolly’s CPI was investigating the €30m purchase by Justice Minister Michael McDowell’s department of the Thornton Hall site in Co Dublin for a new prison?

According to Professor Dermot Walsh, director of the Centre of Criminal Justice at the University of Limerick, there is something legally uncomfortable about a minister for justice asking the public to trust him on the basis of information supplied by the gardaí and known only to him. Ask the McBreartys about taking the word of the gardaí.

The fact is, Frank Connolly has not been charged with anything by the Director of Public Prosecutions, but he has most certainly been dragged before the forum of public opinion by our self-righteous justice minister.

What Mr McDowell has done, for whatever reason, is to wage war against Mr Connolly and to blacken his name and reputation. In that he has succeeded.

Much has been made of where Mr Connolly was in April 2001, but it is none of the minister’s business, nor that of the public, as he has been charged with nothing related to that time. If he were to be charged, and if there is anything to charge him with, then let that be done under due process.

Mr McDowell has accused him of travelling to Colombia with a convicted IRA man, but Mr Connolly has categorically denied he was ever in that country.

Former High Court judge Feargus Flood, who is chairman of the CPI, has no problem with Frank Connolly, but he obviously has with the conduct of the minister.

The former judge has come out publicly to support the journalist. He has given the minister a lecture on one of the rudiments of the law, and you wouldn’t need to be a law student to grasp it.

All citizens of this country are innocent until proven guilty in accordance with the rules of law administered by the courts of justice, which is provided for in the Constitution, and which cannot be over-ridden by the minister. It may be news to the minister that he can’t override the constitution, but that’s the way it is. At least, that’s the constitutional way.

THE minister leaked the information to the Irish Independent on the rather ridiculous assertion that our democratic system and institutions were under threat. What a way to defend them!

Just imagine stacks - mountains even - of free Indos on the odd street corner, as they regularly appear in Cork, to ward off the threat to the institutions of the State.

This is a publication out of the same stable as the Sunday Independent, which the Taoiseach accused of leading the ‘race to the bottom’ of the appalling standards set by some newspapers in the reporting of Liam Lawlor’s tragic death in Moscow. It also happens to be owned by an honorary knight of the realm. Nice one, Michael!

If just one minister was at fault it could be assumed he was off the wall. Unfortunately, that’s not the case because the entire Government is involved. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has defended Mr McDowell for having “dealt with this matter at all times in a proper way.”

He obviously agrees with a minister leaking information to a newspaper, despite the fact that the same minister insisted on legislation whereby gardaí who did likewise could be fined or imprisoned.

Our Taoiseach was facetious enough to advise Frank Connolly to sue if he felt defamed by the Government. In repeating his support for his justice minister, Bertie Ahern said: “If somebody feels aggrieved at, and maligned by, anything said inside or outside the House, there is a way to vindicate himself or herself through the courts.”

The last time I checked, anything said inside the House - the Dáil - is covered by parliamentary privilege and is protected from the courts.

Or maybe our Taoiseach didn’t know that. Instead of issuing spurious challenges or faulty advice, he might get Michael McDowell to repeat them without that privilege. Or he might care to repeat them himself outside the Dáil or Seanad.

Mr McDowell has also admitted telling “the plain, unvarnished truth” about Mr Connolly to Chuck Feeney, the Irish-American billionaire whose charitable organisation was funding the CPI.

Since Mr McDowell’s version of the unvarnished truth, the €800,000 provided by Mr Feeney has dried up.

In the words of Mr Justice Flood: “By this Christmas, by the end of this year the funds in hand will have been exhausted, the staff will have to be let go... because of a statement made in privileged circumstances where it cannot be tested. If you want to test it, then why not go down to the DPP?”

Why not indeed?