Committee forum has much to offer
IT QUICKLY came to be known as the Abbeylara siege. On April 19, 2000, a chain of events was set in motion in a small townland just outside Granard in Co Longford.
It resulted in the death of a mentally ill young man, the establishment of an Oireachtas committee to investigate the killing, and a subsequent ruling in the courts that politicians were not entitled to carry out such fact-finding enquiries.
John Carthy, the man at the centre of the incident in Abbeylara, was 27 and suffering from bipolar disorder. On Holy Thursday in 2000, he took his legally held shotgun from its cabinet, ordered his mother to leave their cottage, and began firing shots at random out of the house.
His mother phoned the gardaí in the hope they would send a patrol car to the house and calm her son down. However, an operation that began with two local officers escalated to draw in dozens of gardaí from across the Midlands, and also the garda elite, the Emergency Response Unit (ERU).
Attempted negotiations with the young man, who had barricaded himself into his home, were unsuccessful, and after 24 hours John Carthy suddenly emerged. He was still carrying a loaded shotgun. When he began making his way toward Abbeylara village, he was shot four times by two members of the ERU. He died almost instantly.
The incident provoked an outcry.
As the details of John Carthy’s mental illness emerged, there was huge sympathy for his mother, Rose and his sister, Marie. The fact he had died at the hands of gardaí prompted questions about how the operation had been handled.
It was announced that a sub-committee of the joint Oireachtas committee on justice, equality, defence and women’s rights would investigate the incident. The committee was to sit in April 2001.
While Marie Carthy says there was some relief that the death of her brother was not being ignored by government, the decision to hold an investigation within the constraints of the committee came as a disappointment.
“We wanted something to be done, and we wanted answers, but we were disappointed that it wasn’t a full tribunal,” she says.
The committee was to hold just nine days of hearings, and it was allowed to call just 60 witnesses.
While the members of the committee — which included the present Justice Minister Alan Shatter — did visit the scene at Abbeylara, and while hearings did get under way, the Oireachtas inquiry was halted before it could truly begin.
The gardaí took issue with the proposed investigation, and represented by John Rogers SC, brought a case to the High Court, arguing that the committee was acting beyond its powers.
Former Fine Gael TD Monica Barnes was the vice-chairwoman of that Oireachtas committee. Speaking to the Irish Examiner, she said the committee had probably “overstepped the mark” in seeking to investigate the death of a man.
“We knew we would be hammered once it got to the courts, and that the judiciary would take a dim view of what we were doing... It was about a man who was killed. We may have overstepped the mark,” she said.
The High Court upheld the view of the gardaí, and the Supreme Court dismissed a subsequent appeal and ruled that the Oireachtas could not conduct an inquiry which could result in findings of fact and conclusions adverse to the good name and reputation of those who are not members of the Oireachtas.
In the case of Abbeylara, there was still a demand for answers, and within hours of the Supreme Court decision, the then justice minister, John O’Donoghue, announced a full tribunal would be established into the killing of John Carthy.
The tribunal was overseen by Justice Robert Barr. Contrasted with the proposed speediness envisaged for the Oireachtas committee, the Barr Tribunal seemed a drawn-out affair. It sat in public for 208 days over 18 months, 164 witnesses were sworn in, and 20,000 pages of typed transcripts of evidence amassed. The process cost the taxpayer €18 million.
Monica Barnes points out that one of the unfortunate consequences of the so-called Abbeylara judgment by the Supreme Court was that it has prevented TDs and senators from holding any substantive investigations in the past decade.
She says that while the committee inquiry into Abbeylara was unique, the forum of an Oireachtas committee has much to offer in investigating matters of public concern.
“The problem was that it wasn’t a good example to take with regard to testing the rights and capabilities of committees... if you think back to the DIRT inquiry, that was very efficient and it got the answers. The Abbeylara judgment has acted as a total barrier to any other committees having the powers they need, and when you look at the US Congress and Senate committees, you can see the work that can be done,” she said.
The referendum that will take place next week will ask voters to decide whether this situation should be remedied. Those in favour of the proposal point out that the Oireachtas committee is the most efficient means by which matters of public interest can be investigated.
The other side of the argument questions whether we should trust our politicians to investigate such matters. Politicians are vote-getters, there is an onus on them to retain the popular support of their constituents, and there may be some concern about their ability to act entirely in the interest of the greater good on such committees.
For those like Marie Carthy, it comes down also to one other important consideration. For those who feel they are victims of injustice, particularly at the hands of agents of the state, it is not a question of any inquiry. It will always be about the necessity of the correct and appropriate inquiry, in terms of resources, in terms of members and in terms of a definitive answer to the questions of what happened and why.
- Regina Hennelly is author of Abbeylara: The Tragic Shooting of John Carthy
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