Confronting our culture of omerta: The courage to denounce wrongdoing

Every now and then random events collide in a way that highlights the distance between promise and performance. The death of Tony Spollen and the resumption of the Disclosures Tribunal hearings seems such a coincidence.

Spollen was a central figure in the inquiry into the banks’ promotion of bogus non-resident accounts to help customers avoid Dirt tax almost three decades ago. As head of AIB’s internal audit in 1991, he warned the bank that it risked a €127m liability because of these venal arrangements.

Unsurprisingly, he was ignored but some years later a leaked memo led to an Oireachtas inquiry. That uncovered how so many Irish people, many numbered among the great and good, were happy to invent a persona and a fake address to evade tax.

Spollen was excoriated and all but declared a class traitor. He will be buried today, his integrity intact. Hours after Spollen’s death the Disclosures Tribunal resumed its deliberations, almost 15 months after its last sitting. This process was set up as one of clarification though it now looks more like one of calcification.

If the tribunal’s members are driven by a passion to find the truth, as they assuredly are, they have hidden it well. They can, however, argue that their methodology better reflects this society’s ambitions than Spollen’s brave denunciation of the banks.

We seem to regard the exposure of wrongdoing as a crime against the tribe, as some sort of failure of moral or civic courage though it is almost always the opposite. It is as if we imagine the idea of a society of laws as one that undermines our freedoms and challenges our fantasies.

A startling example of that culture was how “touts” were treated by the IRA. Current TV documentaries are a reminder of how this corruption gripped our culture. IRA leader Martin McGuinness was honest but chilling when he declared, on camera, that “touts” knew what to expect — a bullet in the back of the head.

As these figures are all but beatified in the Republican Pantheon it is no harm to remember that they appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner without a mandate of any kind. This is the dynamic that allows “fence maintenance contractors” and those attacking executives running businesses once owned by Seán Quinn, to have such a sinister presence today.

Just as Tony Spollen faced unjustified odium so too did economist Morgan Kelly. A little over a decade ago he warned, accurately, that our economy was fake. At a moment when fake news has become so very corrosive it would be worthwhile to review how he was so savaged by political leaders so certain of their judgment they assured a somnolent Ireland that a “soft landing” lay ahead. Indeed.

We may indulge this foolish omerta but the world has moved on. Whistleblowers have become agents for positive change. So much so that it would not be surprising that if in his later years Tony Spollen did not look at the #MeToo movement with a tinge of envy.

That movement has shown what can be achieved when enough brave people work together to confront institutionalised wrongdoing. It would not be, sadly, surprising if today’s Tony Spollens were equally envious.