Playing by old rules lands Ireland’s ‘indispensable men’ in hot water

WHEN my boss formally announced that the office computer system allowed management to monitor internet use, it focused our minds wonderfully. We realised that what we thought was private was in fact as public as a water-cooler.

None of us had been visiting adult-content sites during work hours. But some of us, post-announcement, stopped using company time to write long e-mails to friends in California and read book reviews on Amazon.com.

It was an electronic stimulus to good behaviour, like those gadgets that can be installed in young drivers' cars allowing them to prove they stay within the speed limit at all times. The lads drive more carefully as a result, we're all safer and they can get a reduced insurance premium. It's a win/win for anybody with judgment.

Which has to make you wonder about the judgment of a man paid e1.61 million a year who can't keep himself from visiting a website that contained "links to material of an adult nature" after monitoring software has been introduced.

Remember when presidential candidate Gary Hart dared the media to check out his marital fidelity and immediately got caught without any? Mike Soden's fall has a Gary Hart ring to it.

The key questions the Gary Hart episode raised were not about the candidate's morals but about his judgment. Ditto Mr Soden. Either he didn't pay attention when told about the introduction of the software. Or he didn't remember being told. Or he thought it was well-trained subservient software that would mind its own business when it came to the top guy.

Now, if a probationer in a company, fresh out of school, earning €16,000 a year, didn't pay attention to such a key input about corporate policy, they wouldn't last long. If they didn't remember it or assumed it didn't apply to them, that probationer wouldn't have a prayer of being made permanent. Yet here was a guy paid 100 times as much as a probationer, the huge salary justified by the requirement that the man be able to make sophisticated judgment calls.

You underestimate computer software at your peril. It's like an electronic elephant.

It has nothing against you personally. It just never forgets anything and if it rolls over on you, flat doesn't begin to describe how squashed you get. You underestimate journalists at your peril, too. Which is what brings Tom Mulcahy's judgment into question. His judgment, not his spectacular business ability.

It's not as if he didn't have a bit of advance warning of this weekend's meltdown. It's 10 years since whistleblower extraordinaire Tony Spollan warned AIB it was headed for trouble on the tax evasion thing.

After that came the bruising Public Accounts Committee hearings on the issue. Given that we now hear he has "tax issues" it's fair to assume Mr Mulcahy has also been engaged in warm negotiations with the Revenue in recent times.

So the weather forecast on this one long-term and short-term was not good.

Despite all the warnings, it seemed to take him by surprise. It certainly generated a statement that wouldn't have stood up to the scrutiny of a first year journalism student. Mr Mulcahy's statement said, inter alia, that he is tax compliant.

It didn't say: "I am and always have been tax compliant." The statement sat up and begged to be kicked squarely in the assertions.

The kicks were duly delivered by the media and by Seamus Brennan. (Minister Brennan was no doubt helped by the fact that he hadn't been the minister who appointed Mr Mulcahy to Aer Lingus.)

How a man as demonstrably brilliant as Mr Mulcahy could demonstrate such willful indifference to realities quite plain to ordinary folk suggests he was playing by the old rule: "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got."

Under that rule, a take-no-prisoners top banker who delivered share value could expect to be loved by shareholders forever (Never mind the arrogance, feel the dividend). He could expect to be on State boards forever (This is a guy who gets things done). He could expect to be brusque with media whenever it suited him (Refusal to be diplomatic is what got him where he is today). The old rule stopped applying some time back.

The first element in the change was the whistleblower. Some whistleblowers are principled and idealistic. Some are unprincipled egotists with thwarted ambitions. Some are corporate gossips egging to share a little stink with as wide an audience as possible. They're everywhere and they will continue to be everywhere.

The second element in the change was the PDs, with their "not on my high moral ground" stance.

The third was the national discomfort over the destruction of lives, livelihoods and reputations among ordinary folk exposed for stashing their nest egg in an offshore nest on advice from their bank.

IGNORING those realities may have happened because someone said to Tom Mulcahy, "Look, if you can honestly say you'd nothing to do with Faldor, the media will leave you alone and go pursue Gerry Scanlan instead. Anyway, you've been so fantastically successful as chairman of Aer Lingus, nobody's going to get upset over a tax issue or two."

If that advice was given and accepted, the advice was daft and the decision to accept it dafter. The media was NEVER going to swallow without chewing a statement from the chairman of a State-sponsored body who is supposed, like Caesar's wife, to be above suspicion.

They were never going to divert their attention to a man like Mr Scanlan, who never had much of a profile and who now, as a private citizen, could stay unavailable for comment until hell froze over. Similarly, while success creates acceptance for otherwise unacceptable actions, Seamus Brennan could not allow Tom Mulcahy's nationally significant contribution as Aer Lingus chairman to outweigh his tax issues. Even if those issues were historic.

Charles de Gaulle once observed that the graveyards are filled with indispensable men. Corporate Ireland's graveyards are filling with indispensable men who keep doing what helped them to succeed, even though the context has radically changed.

It will be interesting to see if the outstanding figure in the next generation goes the same way or adapts to change.

Ryanair's Michael O'Leary could be seen as a cruder latter-day Tom Mulcahy with the volume turned up: phenomenally successful, widely admired and uninterested in being liked.

Siobhán Creaton's book about Ryanair, out this week, establishes Mr O'Leary as the quintessential example of success creating acceptance for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. As long as people are willing to grab airline seats for half-nothing and as long as the company continues to deliver profits, published accounts of Mr O'Leary's "hate beams" directed at Ryanair executives don't matter. Indeed Mr O'Leary's behaviour is seen as the key to his success, ergo acceptable.

As long as the wind doesn't change.

If the wind beneath Mr O'Leary's wings DOES change, he could find that doing what he's always done doesn't get him what it's always got him up to now.

As a few top bankers have found out.