We need a Nuala O’Loan in the South
We have much huffing and puffing from Justice Minister Michael McDowell as he tries to shift some of the blame on to the Rainbow Coalition, when this sorry saga in Donegal began.
The Department of Justice has no investigative role and depends on the integrity of the Garda commissioner and his staff to enquire into wrongdoing, and to rectify things when they have gone wrong.
This did not happen here and it took a tribunal, at great public expense, to clarify the matter. But we cannot have a tribunal every time a complaint arrives on the minister’s desk, and I’m sure many such letters arrive every day. We have had here the spectacle of the complaints made going down the line to the very people complained about.
However, alarm bells should have rung when there were no charges, despite arrests and so-called confessions. Dáil questions were being asked of the then Justice Minister, John O’Donoghue, by Jim Higgins and Brendan Howlin. Has anyone heard from O’Donoghue of late?
Maybe there should be interaction between the DPP and AG (as government law officer) in such cases, in the absence of the gardaí not being able to regulate themselves. The most worrying thing is that this could all happen again in the absence of a Nuala O’Loan-type investigator.
In the first Morris report there was reference to a hoax bomb find at Ardchicken. How very appropriate - the flapping of the wings of chickens coming home to roost has become a hurricane, and the sun is almost blotted out!
Brian McCaffrey
Clifton Crescent
Galway
