The issue isn’t the accusations, the issue is the manner of the outing of Pat Carey

Pat Carey is gone. As a child might say ‘gone, gone’. He is now in the worst of all possible worlds, writes Terry Prone

This is a disgusting disgrace,” a friend texted on Friday morning, when the Pat Carey story led in mainstream media. “The Guards and the media have a lot to answer for.”

Meaning that the story, with its reference to the man at its centre being “distraught”, could not have happened without someone within An Garda Síochána leaking the details of accusations being investigated by the service and without media telling the story in a way that precipitated the issuance of a statement and the multiple resignations-from-posts by the man involved.

The man at the centre of it all was, and is, in an impossible position. He’s not even in as positive a position as that of the American figure who famously, post-vindication, inquired as to which office he should now go to in order to get his reputation back. Mr Carey is not at the end of a judicial process. He’s not at the end of a Garda investigation. He’s not yet even been interviewed by the police service. He is not even at the end of the beginning.

Pat Carey steps down as FF Director of Elections over allegations https://t.co/CCoB66sxj0 pic.twitter.com/Cd22Q04UZN

— Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) November 12, 2015

No evaluation has yet been made by An Garda Síochána of the accusations levelled against him, but the effect on him has been equivalent to conviction. He believed he had to resign as director of elections for Fianna Fáil, freeing the party from any associated problem, and he believed he had to resign his post with the Irish Red Cross. The resignations evoke memories of then taoiseach Charlie Haughey suggesting that until a particular accusation (on the issue of corporate governance) was fully investigated, one household name businessman should “step aside” from his chairing of a State board. It was expeditiously pointed out to Mr Haughey that this wasn’t possible. “He steps in, she steps out again,” may be a line in a song, but it does not apply in state boards. When you’re gone, you’re gone.

Mr Carey is gone. As a child might say, “gone, gone”. He is now in the worst of all possible worlds. He is nowhere, with the cold wind of indirect judgement blowing against him from all sides. That is the reality, and its statement, here, makes no comment whatever on the accusations, on the accusers or on the eventual outcome of the Garda investigation. The issue is the outing. The issue is the manner of the outing.

There can be no doubt that the respect and popularity of the man informs the rage with which people who don’t even know him greeted the sequence of events leading up to the weekend. It’s so easy to condemn and extrude the obviously dislikeable, and so hard to accept any invasion of the rights of someone who is obviously likeable, has had a hard life as a closeted gay man, and who has, in his political dealings, always sought conciliation and rapprochement rather than confrontation.

One of the realities of my work with politicians is that their public prominence makes them uniquely vulnerable. What happened to Mr Carey before the weekend should not have happened to any ordinary citizen of this State. The point is that it would never have happened to any ordinary citizen. It merited the passing of information only because of the man’s prominence, which was increased prior to the equal marriage referendum by his coming out as a gay man. That prominence made a major story out of what, related to anybody else, would never have surfaced until after a file had gone to the DPP, been acted upon, and resulted in a negative decision in a court of law.

We demand openness and transparency of An Garda Síochána. We should also demand confidentiality. In the last fortnight, one elderly man on a trolley in Tallaght Hospital has been outraged by the revelations of details calculated to reveal his identity, and it doesn’t matter to him that the revelations may have been spurred by sympathy for him. It doesn’t matter. He is entitled to his privacy when he goes into a hospital, as are we all.

Garda phones to be checked in probe into Pat Carey leak https://t.co/KXSih7L1jn (RMC) pic.twitter.com/B39iA95wYf

— Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) November 14, 2015

The same applies to any one of us when the gardaí are prompted to investigate us for a possible offence. Mr Carey, like the man on the trolley, was sacrificed and not even out of sympathy, however illegitimate that motivation might be. He was sacrificed because someone who knew something couldn’t resist the adrenalin rush of telling a secret. Someone who knew something couldn’t resist the thrill of sharing with a journalist whose duty it was to gratefully accept a gift. Nor could they resist the thrill of seeing the story they had generated on the front page of a major newspaper.

So let us all join together and give a thumbs down emoji to the person who did the leak, and we’ll all feel better in ourselves, because we would never do anything like that. Or if we did, we would do it in the interest of the accusers. We might have difficulty explaining quite how a leak like this benefits them, but we’d find an explanation, because that is what we do in order to retain residency rights on the high moral ground.

A never-failing method of ensuring tenure on the high moral ground, of course, is the capacity to — in this case — blame the Guards or the newspaper that broke the story, or both.

Really? Is the outrage at either really justified? As soon as the word was out that a “respected” politician and former minister had been accused of offences against minors, every news junkie in this country texted or called every other news junkie in the country, egging to know who it was. None of us can kid ourselves that we did so in the interests of the protection of children or in the interests of the adults now making the accusations. It was pure, unfeeling, unthinking curiosity. The satisfying of that curiosity is why mainstream media exists. It’s also why leaks happen.

In this particular instance, that curiosity was nearly satisfied by authoritative gossip sources, and, as a communications practitioner, I then began to receive phone calls asking how I would advise the man at the centre of it. As if it was a PR issue, rather than an issue of the life and death of the reputation of a man in his 60s. As if he had options.

Then Mr Carey, through his solicitors, issued his statement, indicating that he was resigning, not just as director of elections for Fianna Fáil, but as a member of the party, while also resigning his prestigious post as chair of the Irish Red Cross.

People without personal experience of the man immediately rushed to judgment, because more inferences can be drawn from resignation than are ever intended as implications. If he’s innocent, goes this argument, then he should have toughed it out. People with personal experience of the man bridled, asking how the hell he could have coped with the whispering, with the journalists camping on his doorstep?

The caravan moves on, now. The investigation grinds on. And one man, innocent until proven guilty, must be finding that innocence has a curiously bitter taste.