GSOC/Garda crisis - Mindset at the top is worrying

The greatest enemy a besieged city, a disdainful, ring-fenced establishment or a past-his-sell-by-date tyrant face — as the ousted and fugitive Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich will confirm — is time.

As it passes, the encircled, starved population or the autocrat losing power have fewer and fewer options. The inevitable collapse becomes ever more imminent. Conversely, the greatest ally of a people determined to change their society, and how the ideals they wish to live their lives by are made real, is also time.

If those who wish to instigate deep change have the stamina of character needed to persist in the face of a stonewalling status quo, then they and their ideas — reforms, initiatives, rebalancing, social equity, accountability, justice or just a change for the better, call them what you will — more often than not prevail. Those who outlast, just as war horse England did on Saturday at Twickenham, win the day and the future.

It may be a tad fanciful to compare the crossroads we face in our public affairs — our response, most specifically our political system’s response, to the GSOC bugging scandal and the gathering tsunami of allegations against some gardaí — and the crisis playing out in Ukraine but there are common, undeniable themes.

The worst kind of crisis may have been averted in Ukraine, though that is far from certain, but a population no longer prepared to live without opportunity or tolerate political leaders’ criminality have forced the most profound change. We are not by any means at that point but we are in that kind of a situation.

Even before this weekend’s slew of new allegations against the gardaí we were in a difficult place, one that required a response informed by courage and clarity rather than inner-circle loyalty. As yet, despite all the assurances from politicians that we have no reason to imagine anything less than honest, we have been offered little more than an old boys’ club process to “look into matters”. The “review” of the GSOC allegations seems utterly under-gunned. The serial silencing and undermining of Garda whistleblowers is simply sinister. That the messengers were dismissed and turned into defendants was tragically predictable. That Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan felt free to describe these individuals as “disgusting” is a far from healthy indication of the frame of mind of those at the very top of our justice and policing systems. That Justice Minister Alan Shatter is so very deeply involved in supervising investigations into issues where he was a lead actor is another symptom of how very skewed our moral compass is.

The longer this goes on, the longer the inevitable inquiry, one with real teeth, is deferred, then the worse things will get. Then, after that inquiry publishes its findings, we will be at an all too familiar point — we will have a series of options designed to bring about change. Experience suggests that it is difficult to be optimistic about what might happen then. But as Yanukovich might also confirm, from where ever he’s hiding, you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. We all need — especially the majority of gardaí who are honest, decent and often heroic public servants — a plausible, siege-lifting response to the GSOC and Garda allegations. As yet we have not had one.