Fergus Finlay: It is vital to have full transparency to save Ireland’s reputation

Reputation matters enormously to charities and to any organisation that depends on the trust of people who support them, work for them or depend on them.

REPUTATION matters. It matters to individuals, to companies, perhaps above all to countries. It matters enormously to charities and to any organisation that depends on the trust of people who support them, work for them or depend on them.

There were a number of stories this past weekend that undermined reputation. Each of them serious in its own way — take them together and they can add up pretty quickly to a stain on Ireland’s reputation. And I’m not talking (in this context, anyway) of the political resurrection of Bertie Ahern — that’s a subject that would warrant a page or two all on its own.

There’s a cloud over the ESB this morning. There’s a cloud over a charity that ought to be providing support to subsistence farmers in Africa. There’s a cloud over the horseracing industry. Let’s talk about each in turn, in so far as we can, and then figure out what binds them together.

The ESB is Ireland’s oldest, biggest, and best State company. Its growth and development has mirrored Ireland’s growth and development. One wouldn’t have been possible without the other. In fact the contribution the ESB has made to Ireland throughout its history is almost unmeasurable.

Most of the time, of course, its work is invisible, although we often come to appreciate it most during terrible storms, when the only people venturing outdoors are the ESB crews working to restore power in towns and the countryside. And throughout its history, Ireland’s oldest publicly owned company has never been tainted by scandal.

So when details emerge in the High Court and in the media of alleged unlawful payments within the ESB, we all need to take a sharp breath. This is serious.

The allegations are only reaching us now but have been under investigation for months — including, apparently, by the gardaí. There is at this stage no way of knowing whether isolated instances are being investigated or whether there is a pattern.

A High Court action brought by the ESB seeking to uncover the identities of the employees involved might shed some more light on this.

Minister Eamon Ryan will need to make it his business to find out and to provide substantial public reassurance. The reputation of the ESB will not be helped or protected by any attempt to sweep worries about alleged corruption under the carpet.

Self Help Africa is not that old, but it merged with Gorta a few years ago, and Gorta was the first Irish charity set up to combat hunger in Africa. So it has a long and distinguished history, even if in the past Gorta in particular had to deal with several scandals.

The combined organisation, which now just completed a merger with a similar NGO in the UK, spends around €30m a year in more than a dozen African countries and does extraordinary work.

But now another investigation, going on for several months, is starting to see the light of day. 

A senior counsel, Gearóid Ó Brádaigh, has conducted an internal investigation into complaints made by a number of senior staff of the organisation after they had written effectively to the board saying they had lost all confidence in the man who was their chief executive at the time. The report said he rejected all the complaints made by staff.

There are several quite astonishing findings in the senior counsel’s report. It’s revealed, for example, that Self Help Africa accepted a very large donation from an American company called ATN. I never heard of them myself, but apparently they’re a world leader in something called “optics”.

You can find out all about their optics by having a look at their websites — I logged on to their Euroopean one, www.atneu.com. It explains immediately that the optics involved are binoculars and scopes for rifles — hunting and military rifles. There’s even a delightful picture on the opening page of a glorious stag, with a full set of antlers and the red crosshairs of an ATN scope clearly visible on its chest. Just pull the trigger now, the picture says.

How anybody in their right mind thought that it was appropriate for an Irish charity working with hunger and oppression in Africa to accept a donation from a company like that boggles the mind.

 And it was far from the only finding in the internal report. The charity’s own website talks about transparency an awful lot. That will have to be put to the test now if its reputation isn’t to be damaged further.

If you manged to get to the end of Paul Kimmage’s very long article in the Sunday Independent about the horse trainer Homer Scott, you’d probably conclude that Scott has plenty of questions to answer.

He has surrendered his licence to be a trainer. As far as I can find out this is the first time a trainer has surrendered his licence — and it seems clear that the regulator for the industry, the IHRB, was moving in that direction. In a statement it issued to Kimmage, the IHRB said it was “satisfied to have secured the surrender of Mr Scott’s licence without the necessity of a hearing”.

The IHRB, the job of which it is to keep horseracing clean, is a busy organisation. On its own website, it publishes all sort of statistics — though sadly, none about the number of trainers it suspends or dismisses from the sport. I think that’s because the number is so small that each time it happens it makes the news in its own right. But you will find data relating to, for example, the number of stewards’ inquiries held after races, and the reasons they were necessary.

Half of all stewards’ inquiries in 2020 (298 out of 626) related to careless riding or use of the whip. Half of the rest were inquiries into unexpected improvements in form. Tells you something, doesn’t it?

They do appear to be happy that Homer Scott is no longer a trainer. They say that they have issued no licences to anyone to train anything on the land.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Here’s the thing that all these issues have in common. It’s us. We own the ESB and have done since its foundation. We contribute massively to organisations like Self-Help Africa. Apart from the large amount of money it gets from individual donations, the Irish Aid programme invests €6 million a year in that one charity.

And, of course, the Irish horse racing industry gets millions and millions of taxpayers’ money — massive tax breaks on the one hand and around €80 million a year of public money for the last 20 years or so.

Between the tax breaks and the largesse, our investment in that industry is well over two billion.

So if stuff starts going wrong in any of these areas, it quickly becomes our national reputation that is at stake.

In the world we live in, it’s crucial that Ireland can hold its head high. That’s why we are owed urgent, total, and complete transparency in relation to scandals or potential scandals like these. We all know by now that the thing that’s worse than the scandal is all too often the cover-up. Let’s apply that lesson immediately.