Irish Examiner View: Fraud gardaí are under-resourced

By looking away we are complicit

Former Cork solicitors Keith Flynn and Lyndsey Clarke, who were jailed for labyrinth bank and credit union frauds earlier this week. The top Garda fraud unit is still grossly undermanned. It has 37 detectives but needs up to 50 more.

When he sent two former solicitors to jail for labyrinth bank and credit union frauds earlier this week Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin excoriated all but one of the financial institutions swindled by Keith Flynn and his wife Lyndsey Clarke. Acknowledging that their complicated and well-executed frauds would not have been uncovered but for the vigilance of the Bank of Ireland's crime unit, Judge Ó Donnabháin said other financial institutions, including AIB and Ulster Bank, “were asleep at the wheel” - a phrase, in the context of Irish banking, with a chilling, disturbing air of déjà vu.

In a country that pays up to €1.3bn a year in interest to service debts imposed because of the bank collapse just over a decade ago a recurrence of poor oversight, even on this scale, is unnerving. The Comptroller & Auditor General estimates that keeping drowning banks afloat in 2008 cost this small Republic of 2.3m workers €41.7bn. Is it possible that the banks feel that proper oversight is an extravagance they can neglect because, should the need arise, they will be rescued once again? That the scheme devised by Flynn and Clarke was, when compared to the potential for international, online fraud a modest DIY scam, is unnerving too. This case and its implications must surely stir the Central Bank to demand plausible explanations from these "still asleep-at-the-wheel" institutions. Unless of course, it is "still asleep a the wheel" too. 

It may at first seem a stretch to link the conditions, the laxity that facilitated a relatively minor credit fraud with our lumbering response to one aspect of the pandemic but both reflect the same cultural vulnerability - our aversion to regulations, rules, oversight, compliance, unannounced inspections or if you prefer just one word - accountability. How else is it possible to explain the fact that a year into the coronavirus siege we are still preparing legislation to close airports to all but the most essential travellers? If someone, anyone, could be held to account for this breach in national defences would they still be an Achilles' heel in our Covid-19 war?

This failure plays out on many stages but sometimes it seems a tacit concession rather than an oversight. That is a fair description of the institutionalised tolerance of white-collar crime - despite this week's modest sentencing of Flynn and Clarke.

Today we report that the top Garda fraud unit is still grossly undermanned. The Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB) has 37 detectives but needs up to 50 more. The limitations imposed on GNECB have been highlighted in various reports, including the Hamilton Review, published by the Government last December, a UN anti-corruption report in October and just this week, by Transparency International (TI) Ireland.

This raises the old, unavoidable question applicable to so many distressing episodes in our history - the mother-and-baby homes scandals was just one - and in our contemporary life. When does looking the other way become complicity? It is unimaginable that there is not persistent white-collar crime in this country but those criminals know that it is almost unimaginable that they will be discovered because we ask a grossly under-resourced agency to police them. And those criminals will prosper until we invest properly in measures to stop them.