Alan Shatter: A minister who backed the wrong horse
The next Dáil is going to be all the poorer for the absence of Alan Shatter. Through most of his time in politics, up until his failure to retain his Dáil seat in the general election, Mr Shatter was a pretty rare intellectual force. In opposition he was well able to hold the government of the day to account, and was a notable contributor to private members bills.
As minister for justice he demonstrated some in taking on the legal business, of which he was a product himself. Then he ran into some major problems over issues in An Garda Síochána which eventually led to his resignation from office in May 2014.
It was a savage blow to his career.
It was a savage blow to his sense of self.
Resigning from ministerial office is a rare occurrence in Irish politics. Usually, such as in the cases of Michael Lowry in 1996 and Ray Burke the following year, the departure is associated with impropriety. Mr Shatter, by contrast, left high office with his integrity and reputation for honesty intact.
However, he does appear to labour under the notion that his resignation was not attributable to any shortcomings on his own part. Instead, it was down to dark forces, in the media and on the opposition benches, which combined to hound him out of office. Such a theory received a further boost last week when it was reported that the forthcoming Higgins inquiry will exonerate Mr Shatter from the charge that he ignored information provided by the garda whistleblower, Sergeant Maurice McCabe.
The Higgins inquiry was set up following a scoping inquiry by senior counsel Seán Guerin into allegations made by Sgt McCabe of widespread malpractice in the force. Guerin had reported that Mr Shatter had not initiated a proper investigation when he first received Sgt McCabe’s claims. On foot of that, Enda Kenny effectively demanded Mr Shatter’s resignation. Now, it appears, a fuller inquiry has exonerated the former minister of the charge.
“When the Higgins report is published, people will have very different insights and understanding in relation to those events,” he told Seán O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio on March 2. “I’m hopeful that this will become absolutely clear in time to come.”
If the Higgins report does turn out that way, it will be the latest in a succession of reports which, Mr Shatter has claimed, illustrate how he was wronged. The Fennelly report into the resignation of Garda commissioner Martin Callinan exonerated him of any wrongdoing in the run up to Mr Callinan’s departure. Some opposition politicians had questioned whether he had been appraised of facts of a fresh scandal long before he claimed to have been. “We had the Fennelly report which established I dealt truthfully with the issues,” Mr Shatter told O’Rourke. Then there was the Cooke report, another delivered too late to save the former minister. That was into allegations of bugging in the offices of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission.
“The report on the so-called GSOC bugging scandal [Cooke] established everything I had to say at the time was true. It turned out that my narrative was correct, the media approach and opposition approach untrue,” he told O’Rourke.
There you have it. A man wronged by a voracious Opposition and a frenzied media. A man who was punished for nothing more than telling the truth. A man who unfortunately appears to be delusional about why exactly he was forced to resign.
The fact is Mr Shatter had to resign because he had become a political liability. His boss, Mr Kenny, had lost patience with him. When the Taoiseach saw the relatively mild criticism in Guerin, he gave his minister for justice three hours to prepare for the high jump.
Mr Shatter’s main problem was that he had backed the wrong horse. When Sgt McCabe went up against senior management with serious allegations, the minister for justice failed to act as a referee. He may not have ignored Sgt McCabe, but neither did he initiate a serious independent investigation into the allegations.
So it was also with the allegations about the penalty points system. The minister’s response was to order an internal Garda inquiry. Hands up anybody out there who has confidence in an internal Garda inquiry into the conduct of senior officers?
His other response was to attempt to blacken Mick Wallace, who had highlighted the penalty points scandal. On live TV he claimed that Mr Wallace had received the benefit of discretion from officers the previous year on a minor infringement. It was a disgraceful use of confidential information, the innocuous nature of which raised questions as to why it had even been retained within the force and passed up to senior management.
In October 2014, under privilege in the Dáil, Mr Shatter claimed Sgt McCabe and former garda John Wilson had not co-operated with the Garda inquiry into penalty points. If such a charge had been made outside the House, it would have attracted legal action.
When an issue arose over alleged bugging of the GSOC offices in February 2015, Mr Shatter did not express concern at the possibility that GSOC’s security may have been compromised. Instead, he berated GSOC commissioners for not informing him of a problem. That approach amplified the controversy. Time and again, it seemed, when issues arose between Garda management and others — including Mr Wallace, Sgt McCabe and GSOC — the minister did not act as a neutral authority, but sided with Garda top brass. Even then there was time to save the day, had he managed to recognise and accept he had backed the wrong horse. As it became more obvious that Sgt McCabe was a person of substance with real issues of concern, Mr Shatter could have gone into reverse. Something in his make-up prevented him doing so.
By the time his boss finally instructed him to apologise for the allegations he’d made under Dáil privilege about Sgt McCabe and Garda Wilson, it was too late to have any value. What the Fennelly report really showed was that by April 2014, when another Garda controversy blew up, Mr Kenny was keeping his minister for justice out of the loop, such was the lack of confidence in him at that point. Guerin was published a month later, and if the only criticism therein had been about the colour of Mr Shatter’s ties, it would have been enough for Mr Kenny to give him the heave-ho.
It is unfortunate that one so bright had to leave office because of a deficit of the kind of emotional intelligence that is a vital attribute in politics. But that’s the way it was, and Mr Shatter has nobody but himself to blame for his premature departure from office.
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