Enough talking, let’s change the rules

The reaction to the seismic Mahon Report focussed on the villains of the piece — Ahern, Flynn, Lawlor, Burke and O’Callaghan — and their supporting cast.

Great energy and indignation has been used to express outrage that such powerful individuals used position or wealth to influence planning decisions but were any of us really that surprised?

Next Friday Fianna Fáil will consider expelling some of the now-irrelevant lead players but that party, like the rest of society, must do far more than confront those indicted. It, and the rest of us, must consider what must be done to make it far, far more difficult for politicians and developers — or anyone else — to drive a coach-and-four through planning policies to the detriment of society.

Thursday’s anger had built up over many years. Anyone interested in our dysfunctional planning practices already believed that all was far from ideal. Corruption was in the air and politicians of all hues succumbed. Too many of us turned a blind eye and returned them to office at the first opportunity. We championed ethical politics in a theoretical, at-arms-length way, but used to the ballot box to deliver something quiet different.

Judge Mahon’s disturbing report records the inevitable legacy of that ambivalence. In America, to use just one of many examples, there is no such ambivalence.

Last week former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich went to prison for 14 years for corruption. He was convicted in 2011 after he attempted to sell President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat. He has also been banned from holding public office in the State of Illinois for life. His predecessor as governor, George Ryan, is also in jail having been convicted of federal corruption charges after he left office.

Blagojevich — at 55 he will be nearly 70 before he is released — will spend his term in a Colorado prison also home to Jeff Skilling, the former Enron chief who is serving 24 years for fraud.

It is almost impossible to imagine an Irish parallel to those three convictions but that does not have to be the case forever. The Mahon Report made recommendations that should form the basis of an immediate, cross-party, time-framed exercise to turn the anger expressed since Thursday in to the kind of legislation that would make 15-year, €300 million tribunals unnecessary. They should form the basis of one of the most important projects open to this Government.

Among those recommendations are banning Oireachtas members convicted of bribery from public office. Such a conviction would mean they would also lose pension rights.

Firms who bribe politicians would be precluded from the public tendering process. Robust legislation to protect whistle blowers was also suggested. The registration of lobbyists, their clients and an open registrar of the senior politicians they meet, more transparency on political funding and a new planning regulator to oversee rezoning. These are just some of the suggestions — obviously there could be a lot more — but in so many ways the details are far less important than the change in culture such a project would represent.

There is too a feeling that there needs to be a change in culture in our police service. There have been too many instances where more proactive Garda interventions were warranted. We are approaching, if we have not reached it already, that point with the Anglo Irish investigation.

Our indifference to these matters is the main reason we have lost our economic independence. Had effective legislation been in place and enforced — we have plenty of laws but how many are enforced? — we might not be dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Fine Gael has avoided the heavy barrage of the week but there is one issue they must address if the party it is to turn its rhetoric about high standards into something we can all recognise as real. Taoiseach Enda Kenny must explain why Denis O’Brien, a man found by the Moriarty Tribunal to have influenced former Communications Minister Michael Lowry to win the State’s second mobile phone licence for Esat Digifone, was at the Government-endorsed Farmleigh think-in. It must also explain why Mr O’Brien appeared with the Taoiseach at the New York Stock Exchange last week.

Such a public association, at the very centre of world finance, with a man who has used his great wealth and media outlets to try to undermine a Government-appointed tribunal, is not an image Ireland can afford right now. Especially as the sums of money involved in O’Brien’s case dwarf anything considered by Judge Mahon.