Go on, say sorry — you’ll feel so much better for it

ONE of this country’s most eminent judges once acted for me in a libel case. I had published a book about famous Irish murders, and, in my account of one of them, had accidentally side-swiped an innocent bystander. Said innocent bystander happened to read the reference in the book and sued me.

The amazing thing was that the bystander was still alive, since the murder had been a pre-WWII killing. But alive they were, of advanced years, and deeply upset that everybody could read a false allegation against them — originally made by the accused in the case — and think they were a rotten person.

I wanted to plead guilty straight away. In fact, I wanted to go to the bystander’s house and say I was sorry. Sorry without prejudice: we would still pay damages.

The lawyer told me, in no uncertain terms, that there was no bloody way I was going around to the house or saying sorry. I demanded to know why. He sat back and breathed heavily for a moment or two.

“Tell me something,” he then said. “How long are you in journalism?”

“Twenty years. This is the first time I’ve ever been sued.”

This, he told me, explained my naivete. (His expression also suggested he thought I must have been doing terribly dull unchallenging journalism if I hadn’t been sued more often.)

Not being a libellous frequent flier, I didn’t appreciate that, once a case gets into the legal system, you can’t say sorry. You have to stop being a human being and — even more important — you have to stop regarding the person you’ve wronged as another human being.

Of course, some individuals and organisations are joined at the hip to the legal system. The medical profession. The Church. The Garda Síochana. Erich Segal coined the (false) proposition that “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. He should have said “Lawyers mean never having to say you’re sorry”. Because lawyers go into spasm at the possibility of an instinctive apology, figuring it will double the damages incurred by their client. They would shrug off as reckless and unwise any suggestion that saying sorry might a) be the ethical option, and b) might minimise rather than propagate lawsuits.

Not that lawyers are exclusively responsible for an unwillingness to apologise. The recently published final report of the now- defunct Garda Síochana Complaints Board speaks of what it calls “the total inability of the gardaí, where a genuine bona fide mistake has been made, to offer apologies for that mistake”.

The chairman of the board clearly doesn’t buy the notion that guards refuse to apologise when they make a boo-boo due to fear, within the force’s top brass, of enmeshing themselves in law suits. Logically, this could not be so, since he maintains that down the years, a failure to apologise has “resulted in the State being sued and a great deal of money wasted because of that”.

Typical of the kind of mistake the board maintains would merit an immediate apology is the case where “gardaí on a drug search went to an apartment into which a totally innocent pair had moved some months before. Apparently unaware of this the gardaí broke into the apartment while the occupants were out working. They broke down the door, caused damage to the apartment and then discovered that their suspect did not actually live there”. The discomfited innocent owners of the flat are still waiting for an apology.

The board credits its failure to persuade the gardaí that apologies are a good way to sort out problems to the advice of Garda representative bodies that the complaint might stick on a HR file. It will be interesting to see what the body succeeding the board will achieve in the apology department.

IT has to be acknowledged, however, that some people, with or without legal advice, with or without trade union instruction, seem to have been born without the apology strand in their DNA. A classic example is the British businessman Mike Ashley, who saw the value of his company cut in half since its flotation five months ago.

He called those who’d complained about their losses “cry babies” while declaring himself to have “balls of steel”, no doubt a declaration of enormous consolation to those facing penury because of sinking their few bob in his endeavours.

Also missing the apology gene is Mr Mele. Cosimo Mele is the MP belonging to the right-wing political party that pushes family values in the Italian parliament and wants MPs regularly drug tested. A fine, upstanding man who has been rendered a tad less upstanding by a prostitute taking an overdose of cocaine in his hotel bedroom.

Mr Mele has to be the all-time, Oscar- winning, Guinness Book of Records apology-avoider. First of all, he said he hadn’t known the girl was a prostitute, although he did admit that he wasn’t “the kind man women seek out with a lantern”. On this particular night, he must have had an unusual glow off him. Or something.

The key thing, he pointed out, was that he had not paid the sex worker for sex. Well, OK, he had given her money. But it was just a gift. And not, he explained, that much of a gift, either. Not excessive...

Next, he wanted credit for calling an ambulance when the woman went into seizures. Well, you know yourself. He could have just let her die. But brave, upright Cosimo just lifted the phone and called for help. What a man. He was proud, he said, to have risked exposure in the interests of saving her life. It’d give your self-esteem a bit of a boost, all right. As well as removing the need to explain away a corpse in your room the following morning when housekeeping came around.

Against this pattern of peerless probity, Cosimo couldn’t figure out why his centre-right party wanted his resignation. Here he was, an ordinary married man out of an evening, who just struck up “a sympathetic rapport” with a young woman who then went and had hallucinations and delirium on him. How could that not match family values? They had to explain it to him more than once before he resigned. However, even when he’d resigned from his party, he still sought to hang on as a deputy in parliament, not wanting to deprive the body politic of his contribution. Understandably.

All this data supply to the media and negotiation with his political party took precedence over apologising to his wife, who is currently expecting their fourth child. He’d get around to it, he promised, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell their three kids. Just as well mass media and the bullies among their friends will have done it for him.

What Cosimo and others don’t realise is that, apart from being the right thing to do, the purgative relief of a straightforward, unconditional personal apology cannot be underestimated.