Irish Examiner View: Costs and time of public inquiries threaten role of hearings

Inquiries which are kept “within these walls” can be accused of failing the test of openness.

Honor Murphy and Karina Molloy, members of Women of Honour, outside Leinster House. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

Barely a day passes without a call, of one kind or another, for an inquiry, of this type or that, into some aspect of failure by Government, business, or public body. 

Newspapers, including ourselves, are not backward in making such demands. This is because justice needs to be seen to be done and citizens must be reassured that avenues have been explored when they feel themselves on the wrong end of maladministration.

Where the devil, and the detail, resides is in the manner in which such processes are constructed, the timescales set for them, and the objectives which they are designed to meet.

A good rule of thumb is that these should be as tightly constituted as possible.

This week’s topic in the spotlight involves the group known as the Women of Honour, who have been campaigning over allegations of sexism, bullying, assault, and rape since complaints were raised in an RTÉ documentary two years ago. Today they will meet Tánaiste Micheál Martin who, during his period as Taoiseach, authorised an independent review to assess the systems, structures, and culture in the Defence Forces to ensure a safe workplace for all.

The problem with investigations which are kept “within these walls” is that they can be accused of failing the test of openness, and in this case, the group representing complainants has not even seen a copy of the report which has been 15 months in the making.

This almost guarantees that its findings will be found to fall short by those at the heart of matters, and an early flavour of this can be found in the response by the Women of Honour.

Their statement says: “Bringing people to meetings to be talked to about a report that we are not able to read smacks of little more than a public relations stunt by the Government.”

Nor is this the first time that those who govern the public, or act on its behalf, have failed in effective communications on sensitive matters. In fact, it is a regular occurrence.

Last year a draft report explaining how the remains of 18 deceased babies were sent from Cork University Hospital to Antwerp was initially withheld from distraught families.

In the same month, we learned that the child and family agency, Tusla, spent over €400,000 hiring consultants to blank out information in personal data requests, including from survivors of mother and baby homes.

For the Women of Honour, only a statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses to give evidence and demand full documentary disclosure will do. 

Those demands are likely to be heard again as the Government contemplates the nature of the inquiries it must hold into the lessons of the covid pandemic, a subject on which it continues to haver, hoping to buy time with vague promises.

Last week, Active Retirement Ireland, concerned about the damage and loss of rights inflicted on old people during lockdown, added its voice to demands for a public examination of what happened.

Meanwhile, in a separate but parallel probe, the Oireachtas public accounts committee is trying to unwrap what happened when millions of euro were wasted on purchasing ventilators which failed quality-assurance thresholds, were never needed, or were never delivered at all.

These and other threads will need to be pulled into a cohesive review of actions and lessons that can reasonably be learned.

But a warning exists from over the sea. While the British were commendably quick to accept that covid-19 was of such a scale that a full inquiry was needed, their plans have now expanded into a hydra-headed monster.

Legal bills for the 150 lawyers who have been hired already exceed €125m before a single question has been asked at any open tribunal and 20,000 responses have been received to the consultation on the terms of reference.

The gloomiest estimates are that the procedures could last seven years — seven fat years for the legal profession.

Not that inquiries represent the end. In London this weekend, performance closed in the second of two verbatim plays about the Grenfell disaster of 2017 in which 72 people died. System Failure, based on the transcripts of the public hearings, revealed a grim litany of lies, cost-cutting, greed, buck-passing, and incompetence, described by Andy Roe, commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, as “the most appalling example of institutional failure in recent British history”. 

No one has yet been prosecuted. Legal action is likely to follow the publication this summer of the report by former senior judge Martin Moore-Bick, the outcome of a Metropolitan Police investigation, and a review of evidence by the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Potential charges include corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud, and health and safety offences. More than 1,000 members of the Grenfell family community have started civil law proceedings.

Inquiries have consequences, which is why they can become so complicated and top-heavy. If they are to play a role in a world of increasing complexity, then we must find ways to make them more speedy. And cost-capped.