The Government is transparent and open — when it suits them

TRANSPARENCY. Accountability. They’re cliches now, aren’t they? They are used so often in commentary about current events that they have almost lost their meaning.

And yet they are relatively new terms in the Irish political dictionary.

Governments of Ireland in the 1960s and '70s never talked about such issues.

Business was done in secret, in the smoke-filled rooms that would have filled Michael Martin with horror. By and large, though (at least as far as we know), it was done honourably. It wasn't until much later, when the era of GUBU and other events began, that there began to be a real premium on notions like transparency and accountability.

This Government hates the concept of transparency, and as we know, it has moved to close down as many of the avenues through which information reaches the public as it can. It claims to be accountable, of course, and yet the list of stunts and strokes it has pulled gets longer by the day.

And yet, events prove the need for the principles. Some of the shocking and disturbing things that happened last week, as well as some of the less important ones, show us more than ever that when transparency and accountability lose their value in a political system, the result is degrading.

Take one of the less pressing issues first and I fully appreciate that at first glance it may not seem all that minor. You were as shocked as I was, I suspect, to read in the Sunday newspapers that there were hundreds of doctors on a gravy train that we were all financing.

According to these stories, hundreds of thousands of your euro and mine were paid last year to a few individuals and some of these individuals had been involved in a public row with the Minister for Health only last week. Aren't those doctors some chancers that was my initial reaction anyway.

Then I began to look a little bit closer. It transpires that the larger figures weren't paid to individuals at all, but to group practices, and weren't designed to cover just the doctors' fees, but to run what are effectively small businesses, employing doctors and a number of support staff. I have yet to meet a hungry doctor, I admit, but the presentation of the money they receive from the GMS doesn't stack up against the reality.

Then I began to wonder where the names of all these doctors that were plastered all over the Sunday papers came from. The list of names is not in a public statement from either the Department of Health or the General Medical Services Board or at least if it is, neither body has put that statement on its public website. They're not to be found in the annual report of the GMS either.

In fact they appear to have been supplied by the Department of Health to the Sunday newspapers, presumably because they all had the bright idea of asking for the names.

That some of their names, plus a very distorted impression of their personal earnings, suddenly appeared in the papers couldn't, naturally, have anything to do with the fact that the Minister for Health had a public row with the doctors during the week. Could it?

In fact, according to the latest GMS report I have been able to find on the web the one that takes us to the end of 2002 2,134 medical practices were paid a total of just under €272 million. They were paid that money in respect of just over €1.16 million eligible patients. That's around €125,000 per medical practice some of those practices are individuals, as I said, and many of them are group practices.

According to the GMS, the cost of fees amounted to €221 per patient over the year. Even though that doesn't sound like bad value on a per-patient basis, it's a considerable increase over previous years. Although the GMS doesn't say so, the reason for the increase, it appears, was the Government's decision to give everyone over 70 a medical card.

The overall impression one gets, therefore, is that spin was used last weekend to attack doctors because they were being obstreperous even though the primary reason for the increasing spend was a decision that had nothing to do with doctors in the first place.

Incidentally, I notice from the same GMS report that 1,249 pharmacists collected more than half a billion in prescription costs and that included more than €100 million in dispensing fees. They'd better not have a row with the Minister, or their names will be all over the papers next weekend!

One area where spin was simply not possible last week was the genuinely shocking conclusions of the Morris Tribunal. The central question that has to be asked arising from that report is this is there any possibility that the culture of corruption, secrecy and mismanagement uncovered in Donegal is more pervasive? If it is, we have a truly serious problem on our hands.

There is reason to fear a more pervasive culture. That reason is to be found in the failure of the Morris Tribunal, despite its best efforts, to secure any kind of open co-operation from members of the force for its enquiries. If you've had any experience of the Garda Siochána, you'll know that the first thing they do in the face of any criticism or questioning is close ranks. It's what Minister Michael McDowell called a "hedgehog culture" driven, he has said, by a management culture that is very stern on anyone who has admitted a fault.

He's right. But if he wants to seriously address that, he is going to have to look at some of his own initiatives again. He has already moved his Garda reform bill in the Senate (it has passed second stage there), and it is not nearly strong enough when it comes to independent management and investigation, despite what the Minister says.

But more to the point is Section 55 of that bill, which makes its an offence for any member of the Garda to reveal "harmful" information an offence punishable by fines up to €50,000 and/or a jail term up to five years. Harmful information, in this context, can include (among other things) anything that reveals the identity of a Garda source or anything that prejudices the security of internal Garda communications. There are exceptions, of course, but the onus is on the person revealing information to establish that it was not harmful and the presumption in the Bill is that "disclosure of information... is likely to have a harmful effect if a reasonable person would, in all the circumstances, be aware that its disclosure could have that effect."

Provisions of that sort, whatever the Minister's intentions, copperfasten the hedgehog effect he wants to get rid of. The revelations made by Morris, apart from their immediate impact, prove once again that when there is no interest in transparency, and when organisations are accountable only to themselves, the potential for real and lasting damage is extraordinary. The restoration of those principles to the Garda Siochána is of paramount importance. But we could do with a lot more of them in our politics too.