McDowell should get off the stage and try new tactics in drugs war

IT was not so long ago that Michael McDowell was calling for the jailing of gardaí who leaked information.

Of course, that was as a result of his suspicion that a garda had given information to a newspaper about an assault on his son. His anxiety about the privacy of his family was understandable, but he has behaved as if he believes there is one law for himself and another for everybody else.

He gave lousy example to public servants in leaking documents to Sam Smyth of the Irish Independent for a story on allegations that Frank Connolly had applied for a false passport and went to Colombia.

As Minister for Justice he has a right to declassify material. He claimed that putting such information in the public domain was justified in the national interest.

Divulging such information may have been in the public interest, but he went about it in the wrong way. Instead of releasing the information properly, he secretly gave it to just one journalist while withholding it from all others. That constituted a leak.

Ivor Callely was ousted last week not so much for what he did or did not do, but because he left himself wide open to allegations of impropriety, whereas a minister should be above suspicion.

It was because he was not being seen to do the right thing. Mary Harney met with the Taoiseach on the eve of Callely’s removal. No doubt she had some poignant words about the propriety of Ivor’s conduct.

The PDs have always been strong on this kind of thing. They forced Charlie Haughey to sack Brian Lenihan as Tánaiste over the conflicting stories he told about phone calls to President Paddy Hillery in 1982.

The PDs compelled the withdrawal of Jim McDaid’s nomination as Minister for Defence in 1990 because he had been photographed with some Provos outside the Four Courts, and they ultimately delivered the coup de grace in 1992 by forcing Charlie Haughey to step down as Taoiseach over the telephone tapping of Geraldine Kennedy and Bruce Arnold almost ten years earlier.

The PDs have always been good about prancing on the high moral ground.

There is nothing wrong with advocating morality, but there is a lot wrong with the hypocrisy of attacking people for doing the same thing as oneself, such as denouncing leaks and then engaging in blatant leaking. The whole thing was made worse by the fact that the Minister for Justice was turning our judicial process on its head.

Mr McDowell got upset over a reputed garda leak concerning an assault on his son. He demanded that garda protection be removed from his home. That was his right, but again he went about it the wrong way. He told a woman garda, who had been ordered to patrol outside his house, “to hop along”. That kind of thing is inimical to discipline. He should not give orders to ordinary gardaí. There is a proper chain of command, and he should have gone through the Garda Commissioner. If the PDs were in opposition, or even in the old days when they were in power propping up Charlie Haughey and Albert Reynolds, they would pull the plug on a minister like the late Seán Doherty behaving with such arrogance. Poor Jim McDaid did not even get his posterior in the chair as Minister for Defence before he was given the bum’s rush.

McDowell has been bingeing on publicity by picking high-profile confrontations with just about everyone. At one stage, not so long ago, he was at odds with Mary Harney and the PDs. During the last general election he took on Fianna Fáil and pulled off a magnificent coup by rescuing the PDs virtually singled-handedly. As Minister for Justice he has had major squabbles with the gardaí, the media and the prison service.

On Ryan Tubridy’s television show recently he seemed to be blaming the Dublin 4 set for the drug problems. Some of them are undoubtedly part of the problem.

With more money than brains, they have popularised cocaine as a kind of yuppie drug. McDowell essentially recognised that the drug situation is out of control because vast profits can be made from peddling the stuff.

In real terms, illicit drugs have never been cheaper, which is the surest sign that the authorities are losing the battle.

THAT was inevitable because we have persisted in using the exact same tactics that have failed dismally in the United States for the past 40 years. In the process we have generated a new breed of organised criminal in Ireland.

If the approach currently being adopted succeeded in stemming the flow of drugs tomorrow, we would be confronted with an explosion of petty crime because addicts would be compelled to steal more to feed their habits. Instead of tackling addiction as a medical problem and seeking to cut the spread of drugs by eliminating the profits, we persist with tactics that have failed everywhere.

We had the absurd situation recently of gardaí privately pleading with the drug gangs in Dublin to stop killing each other. This suggests that they no longer believe the old methods work. Those whom they arrest on suspicion refuse to answer questions. They just stare at a spot on the wall and wait to be released.

The minister, who once famously proclaimed that he knows what he knows, is much too smart to think that he knows everything. Nobody does, and hence we have due process to prevent people being railroaded. McDowell could adapt due process by getting the Oireachtas to pass legislation to remove the right of silence.

Many people remember our ‘patriotic’ criminals being jailed ‘for failing to give an account of their movements’. That was a time when people in most of the country could leave their homes unlocked at night. A cold-blooded murder was little more than an annual occurrence countrywide, but now it is almost a daily event. There is a drugs war going on in Dublin, but the Minister for Justice has diverted attention from it, with the help of the Provos.

They and others have been behaving as if their criminal behaviour was a game of ‘catch me if you can’. Around this time last year Sinn Féin was kicking up about the Government accusing the IRA of involvement in the Northern Bank raid.

Gerry Adams and company demanded that the Government produce evidence of IRA involvement in much the same that their colleagues are now demanding evidence of Frank Connolly’s alleged activities. Given Sinn Féin’s record, society at large cannot just accept their word in relation in Connolly’s case. If he was not in Colombia, it should be easy for him to prove that by telling us where he was at the time.

The Sinn Féin people are vocal in calling for due process for themselves, but then they violate it with impunity. On Wednesday one Sinn Féin deputy was demanding that Dermot Ahern abandon due process in relation to inspecting American planes at Shannon to ensure that the CIA are not transferring prisoners.

Sinn Féin can’t always have it both ways.