Maurice McCabe Interviewed: ‘This took six years out of all our lives’
AS HE walked up to accept his award as a Person of the Year on Saturday, Maurice McCabe may well have reflected on the past 12 months.
This time last year, his world was a dark place. His efforts to highlight the abuse of the penalty points system, and its cost in terms of lives and money, was hitting a succession of brick walls.
He was at that time an anonymous whistleblower, enduring the usual treatment meted out to those who break rank to point out wrongdoing. Vicious rumours about his motives and character were spread like manure, through the force, across the media. Every effort was made to discredit his allegations.
The then justice minister, Alan Shatter, had, under the privilege of the Dáil, accused him of failing to co-operate with the internal Garda inquiry set up to investigate his allegations. The claim inferred he was not just making mischief for the force, but failing to do his duty. The Garda commissioner had largely dismissed the allegations. Contacts with the Department of Justice were running into the sand. Everybody in power wanted him to just go away, forget about all this stuff, and stop making waves. But he wouldn’t go away.
“One reason why I kept going was that it was still happening,” he says. “Even when it had been highlighted. It needed to be stopped. How the public were being treated needed to be stopped.
“And here’s the important thing. I wanted reasonable standards to be applied. Not high standards. Just reasonable standards, so that the public would get that at least.”
In pursuit of such a goal, McCabe came to be known as the whistleblower, a term that grates with his wife, Lorraine.
For six years the family lived with the consequences of Maurice raising his head above the parapet and calling out what he saw as wrongdoing. Some of his colleagues quietly agreed with him, but nobody was willing to stand shoulder to shoulder. The cost was too high.
Others, particularly in some senior roles, were put out at what they regarded as a form of insubordination. Who was this lowly sergeant to be questioning how things had always been done?
So how lives a whistleblower? Hollywood’s take on a whistleblower as persistent as McCabe might have him as a loner, slightly disconnected from the general populace, driven by motives like revenge, or righteousness, or plain disappointment.
McCabe doesn’t live down to the stereotype. His home is alive with the sound of four schoolgoing kids. The eldest is home every weekend from university. Lorraine works out of the home, juggling, directing, organising, and constantly worrying.
At the height of the whole thing, when her husband was under attack, in the media and within the force, Lorraine used to rise at 5.30am. All the daily papers were scanned online, to filter any bad news, or shield Maurice from the worst of it.
“It took over Maurice’s life completely, and we had to live with it,” she says. “Fear was my biggest thing. The fear of being set up for something. With all we had seen, you’d just never know.”
The family live a stone’s throw from the shores of Lough Sheelin, on the Cavan-Meath border, not far from where McCabe was raised. His 87-year-old father Michael lives nearby, still active, still batting for his son. Apart from their siblings, Michael was the only other support the couple had to lean on during the dark days.
A hint as to why McCabe stubbornly insisted on pursuing the truth through thick and thin can be spotted in the genes. Back in the 1970s, big agribusiness interests were polluting Lough Sheelin with pig slurry at a ferocious rate. Michael McCabe made a stand against it, and pursued the wrongdoing all the way to Leinster House, where his cause was finally acknowledged and addressed.
So why? Why did McCabe mortgage his career by effectively taking on the force he served in order to weed out wrongdoing?
The story has its origins in Bailiboro, Co Cavan, where he served as station sergeant. The posting suffered from the kind of lack of supervision highlighted in the recent Garda Inspectorate report. But whenever McCabe brought issues to the four different superintendents under whom he served, they were addressed.
“Things come to your attention when you’re looking after a station, but when I highlighted these issues, management would listen. I’d highlighted a number of things, and different management had addressed them.”
This analysis chimes with testimony from the four senior officers in question, published in the Guerin report last May. All four spoke in the highest terms of McCabe’s professionalism.
The fifth to act as district officer, arriving at the station in 2007, was a different kettle of fish, as McCabe saw it. Matters like shoddy investigations, and failure to investigate crimes at all were let lie.
He pursued the issue, and made a complaint to headquarters. Little came of it. Then, he noticed something.
“I came across it in 2009 or 2010, along with the other stuff, I could see that the officers not investigating the cases I’d highlighted were also involved with the penalty points. Then I discovered that the deletion of points was widespread.”
He compiled a dossier to hand over to senior management. “I wasn’t looking for small stuff. I concentrated on the repeat offenders, the people who were getting off despite being caught again and again, often doing crazy speeds.”
Little came of it. HQ didn’t want to know. He went outside the force through the confidential recipient, a move he took with great reluctance. Still nothing. He emailed the Taoiseach, who passed it back to the justice minister, who passed it back to the Garda commissioner.
By then, he had met John Wilson, whom he’d known when they both served in Clones, Co Monaghan. He briefed Wilson on his concerns. In frustration, the pair approached a group of independent TDs, a move that is provided for in law.
Once the matter hit the public domain, things took a turn for the worse. The justice minister ordered an internal Garda inquiry, rather than having an independent examination of the allegations. In December 2012, he was visited at his place of work in Mullingar, and informed that his access to the Pulse computer system was to be limited. This restricted his ability to do his job.
That Christmas, he was rostered to work through the holiday, and, after over a week on duty, he came home on St Stephen’s Day hoping to catch the tailwind of the seasonal warmth in the bosom of his family, shutting out all the bad stuff. Two days later, he was visited by senior members dispatched from HQ.
“That was the lowest point,” he says. “I have never in my 29 years of service seen officers going to the house of a member except when there’s a death.”
He wasn’t feeling well on the morning in question, and Lorraine went out to meet the two men.
“They wanted to know what was wrong with Maurice, asking me these questions,” Lorraine says. “It was a desperate time. We were waiting for a squad car to come and begin searching the house. We had done nothing wrong. Maurice had done nothing wrong. The whole world can see that now, but back then, that’s how things were being done.”
The senior officers were there to tell McCabe that his restrictions on access to Pulse would now be complete. This news couldn’t have waited until he resumed work the following week. Somebody in headquarters had deemed it necessary to puncture the McCabes’ attempt to shut out all the noise for a few days of quality time with their family.
“I couldn’t do the job properly after that,” he says. “It affected me but it affected the unit I work with and the public. As the unit sergeant I couldn’t give instructions to the guards. I couldn’t tell what intelligence there was out there. You need that information if you’re in a supervisory role. I never knew anything in relation to burglary, armed robberies in the area, nothing. In one way you could say I was under house arrest.”
That year, from January 2013, was pretty bad. The internal Garda inquiry was largely a whitewash. It looked as if the truth would remain sealed in the depths of the Pulse computer system. McCabe tried everybody. In some quarters, he got a positive reception. The head of the Road Safety Authority, Noel Brett, was easily won over. The transport minister, Leo Varadkar, met McCabe and found him to be credible. The Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General compiled a report that showed huge revenue loss through the abuse of the system. But in the elevated perches of both police and government, where the real power resided, the resistance was as fierce as ever.
When McCabe handed over records to the Public Accounts Committee, commissioner Martin Callinan tried to retrieve the documents. The lawmakers were being told by the top cop that they had no right to view the results of how the law was being enforced.
In January, Callinan came before the PAC, where he issued his “disgusting” remark, in response to how McCabe and Wilson had conducted themselves. That was the day that McCabe was publicly named for the first time.
“I was watching it at home on the TV, I knew it might come, because I’d been in correspondence with John McGuinness [chair of the PAC].”
How did it feel, to have his name out there? “I didn’t like it,” he says. I didn’t like it at all, but...” his shoulders rise into a shrug. The price. Another payment to be made in pursuit of the truth.
The following week, he appeared before the committee. Finally, deaf ears were no longer being turned his way in the corridors of power.
“I’ll always remember it,” he says of his appearance before the committee, held in private. “It was an incredible experience, going in and telling somebody what was going on. I said to them that even though it had been going on for 18 months, that was the first time that I’d been interviewed by anybody about what was going on with the penalty points.”
The appearance came at the cost of his anonymity. The TV shots of him entering and leaving Leinster House that day told their own story. He was filmed looking for the entrance on his arrival, unsure of how to gain entry to the seat of power. He passed the guard on duty, offering a wry smile. Then, leaving, the media pack pursuing him, his head down, moving fast to get back to the real world. Job done.
“I was believed by the people in the Public Accounts Committee, I could see that. It felt good. At last somebody could see that what I and John Wilson were saying was actually true.”
A thread had been pulled. In the following months, a succession of events saw his core allegations of the mishandling of criminal investigations come to the fore. Senior counsel Sean Guerin investigated and vindicated practically everything that McCabe had been saying.
Reports from the Garda Inspectorate, on both the penalty points and criminal investigations within the force, further endorsed everything he had been saying. With a parting of the clouds came relief. A sense of normality began to seep back into the McCabe household.
For Lorraine, the end couldn’t come quick enough. “It had been a rotten time,” she remembers. “Every day Maurice went into work, he’d ring and I’d ask whether anything was waiting for him in there, he was getting all these instructions from Dublin.
“Maurice goes out of the house and turns right [for Mullingar, where he’s based]. I turn left and meet everybody. You’d see it: guards’ wives avoiding me. Some people stopped talking to me, it was all out in the public.
“And then when the truth finally came out, it was like a shadow had been lifted from our lives.”
This weekend’s award is another recognition of what McCabe achieved along with Wilson. Last month, the Irish Road Victims Association presented the two men with an award at a ceremony to mark World Remembrance Day for victims of road traffic accidents. McCabe says the event in Mullingar was highly emotional, and he felt humbled by the award.
Despite the truth being dragged out into the light of day, the sergeant’s travails didn’t end there. Word came out of Mullingar station that he was being subjected to further bullying. For some within the force, loyalty to some notion of the collective culture within the force was still a higher calling than the truth. McCabe doesn’t want to talk about the present, as there is an investigation ongoing into his treatment. All he’ll say is that he is happy with the way things are progressing.
Then, when he thought it was all over, there was another shock in store. A colleague approached him in June, pointed to what were to his mind obvious further abuses of the system. McCabe couldn’t believe it. After everything, the scandals, the publicity, the resignations, a new code of practice, some senior officers were carrying on as if nothing happened, as if they were above the law.
This time, management listened to him. In an unprecedented move, he was seconded to assist the investigation into the latest allegations. Once again, his claims have been vindicated. The difference this time around is that senior management appear to be genuinely intent on stamping out the abuse.
It’s been a long road. “Six years, that’s what it took out of our lives,” McCabe says. “It’s shocking when you think about it.
“But I believe I did my job. I did my duty and that’s all that matters.”
Paper trail
Maurice McCabe has paid tribute to the Irish Examiner’s coverage of the penalty points scandal.
Mr McCabe said the true extent of the abuse of the penalty points system would never have made it into the public domain only for the newspaper's coverage and persistence. He said that, during his darkest moments, the newspaper’s campaigning and support kept him going.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
