Ray Burke is still being rewarded for his betrayal of public trust

RAY BURKE is primarily a victim of his own arrogance. If there were real justice, however, he would have plenty of political company.

In a sense, Judge Desmond Hogan made it clear that Burke was really being jailed for betrayal of trust. He was already fully tax compliant, and the judge concluded in the circumstances “the sentence should not be a long one.”

In effect, it was little more than a token sentence. Many people undoubtedly feel that his betrayal of the public trust warranted a much stiffer jail term. But Burke was not charged with this. Indeed, have the politicians even bothered to make it a crime? Even though he did undoubtedly betray that trust, he will still be drawing his huge pension while he is in jail. That is his reward for serving the people.

Are we missing something here? Liz McManus of the Labour Party pointed out during the week that if they put Burke into an old folks’ home instead of a jail, this Government would take 80% of his pension.

Would somebody in the Government please explain to us how anybody can justify taking the bulk of the pension from somebody in an old folks’ home while still paying the full pension to a criminal in jail?

Burke has become a kind of hate figure in society and we should be very careful to ensure that people realise that he is not being figuratively hanged for the wrong crime. Justice is blind in that people are supposed to be treated equally.

For some, Rambo got special treatment from the court in that he was effectively jailed for something for which he was not convicted. If the special treatment had been favourable to him, there would be an outcry, but there should be an outcry, too, if it violates his right to due process. Could this provide him with grounds for an appeal?

We have had too many high-profile convictions overturned on appeal, like those of George Redmond and Colm Murphy, the only man ever convicted of involvement in the Omagh bombing.

The Colm Murphy conviction was overturned last week because the court was not satisfied that the three judges who heard his case in the Special Criminal Court had given enough consideration to the alleged misconduct of two gardaí. Was it just a coincidence that the authorities announced that the books of evidence in relation to perjury charges against those two gardaí had been served?

Questions should be asked about the timing of that announcement on the day on which the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned Murphy’s conviction. It was known for some time that the decision would be delivered that day, so why was the announcement of the serving of the books of evidence made on the same day, of all days?

It certainly left the authorities open to the accusation of seeking to scapegoat the two gardaí, and this could ultimately be viewed as prejudicial to a fair trial.

If Ray Burke had not been a former government minister, there is little doubt that he would not have got a jail sentence. He had settled with the revenue. Moreover, he pleaded guilty. Those were mitigating circumstances that Judge Hogan took into account before passing sentence. Normally judges take matters into consideration that have nothing to do with the crime, such as the guilty person’s character and previous record - be that good or bad. In Burke’s case his government service was not a mitigating but a compounding factor.

He was a member of the government that introduced the tax amnesty that allowed people to pay a fraction of what they should have paid, and it also afforded them protection against prosecution. But having done that, he did not come clean, which made his crime all the worse. So what he got was the least he deserved.

TALKING about justice in the context of such crimes seems almost ludicrous against the backdrop of the monstrosity of the Holocaust, which has been featuring prominently in the news this week.

As usual, de Valera’s gesture in proffering sympathy to the German ambassador, Edouard Hempel, following the death of Hitler, has been dug up again. When Franklin Roosevelt died a little over two weeks earlier, de Valera surprised the American ambassador David Gray by paying a very moving tribute to the late president. The Dáil was also suspended in a gesture of sympathy, even though Gray and Roosevelt had conspired against this country’s efforts to stay out of the conflict.

Gray had proposed various invasion schemes and he even suggested an Allied blockade of this country in order to create famine conditions so that the Americans could come in and announce that they were saving the Irish people from the stupidity of the de Valera government.

When Hitler killed himself, de Valera paid no tribute to him and the Dáil was not suspended, but the Long Fellow did feel that it would be an “unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation and to Dr Hempel himself” if he did not proffer condolence to him. The Taoiseach was not about to insult Hempel, who had greatly facilitated his successful efforts to keep Ireland out of the war. De Valera had a much higher regard for Hempel than for Gray.

“During the whole of the war,” he wrote, “Dr Hempel’s conduct was irreproachable. He was always friendly and invariably correct - in marked contrast with Gray. I certainly was not going to add to his humiliation in the hour of defeat.”

Politically, the gesture was a huge blunder because de Valera’s critics abroad were able to exploit the gesture to persuade people that he sympathised with the Nazis and so disliked Britain that he was hostile to the Allies. This was utter nonsense, but many people believed it - indeed, they still believe it.

Some surprise has been expressed that so many young people do not even know about the Holocaust.

Yet nobody should be surprised when they are ignorant of their own history. For decades we shied away from teaching modern history for fear it would be too divisive while the civil war bitterness persisted. Now history has been squeezed out in the race for points. The subject is perceived to be so time-consuming that students shy away from it. We have a very rich history that should be fascinating, but unfortunately, too many of our historians have contrived to make it boring.

In the coming months there will probably be many reminders of the horrors that unfolded with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Some people will think we could dispense with all those gruesome stories, but it is important that they should be aired because highlighting such things is a means of trying to ensure that similar things do not happened again. Of course, we have since witnessed genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Those should be a stark and timely reminder of how close we came to such a disaster on this island over the past 30 years.

It should also be a wake-up call for the need to promote the peace process, rather than to allow it to become stuck in the mud of posturing politics.