Ship of Fools (5 page)

What actually happened, however, was something much stranger and ultimately much more damaging. From the mid-1990s onwards, it became ever more undeniable that corruption was deeply embedded, both at the top and the bottom of Irish public life. A deep but vague unease was gradually replaced with facts and figures, offshore accounts and lodgements, givers and takers. Three major figures - Haughey and Burke from Fianna Fáil and Michael Lowry, a minister for the major Opposition party Fine Gael - were caught bang to rights. A largely successful conspiracy to control the development of the capital city by systematically bribing large numbers of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors was uncovered. It became completely clear that the public interest was being literally sold out to an inner circle of businessmen.

Sleazy as these crimes were, they were not unique to Irish politics. What was peculiar to Ireland, however, was what happened next - virtually nothing. Burke was briefly jailed for Revenue offences. Liam Lawlor, the Fianna Fáil fixer who
had a way of turning up whenever there was blurry work at the crossroads of money and politics, went to prison for refusing to co-operate with a tribunal of inquiry. Frank Dunlop, the former Fianna Fáil government press secretary turned local government ‘lobbyist' and bagman, eventually got an 18-month sentence for bribing councillors to re-zone land and make developers rich. George Redmond, the planning official found by the tribunal to have been bribed by Mick Bailey and others, was arrested with £300,000 in cash and stockbroker cheques as he was stepping off a flight from the Isle of Man, and served almost a year in jail. But that conviction was quashed and charges against Redmond were subsequently dropped.

There was, however, no real change in the political culture. No one was actually prosecuted for paying bribes - rich people like the Baileys who benefited from corruption were entirely untouched. Perhaps more importantly, the Irish electorate showed an extraordinary degree of tolerance towards politicians who were known to have engaged in dodgy dealings. One of the key assumptions behind the idea that revelations would change the system was that voters would not want to elect such people. It was sadly naive.

What happened was not that the majority of people disbelieved the evidence of corruption and went on innocently trusting their politicians. On the contrary, public trust in politicians almost evaporated. An
Irish Times
poll of women in 2007 found that just 2 per cent said they ‘completely' trusted politicians in the Dáil, with a further 19 per cent trusting them ‘somewhat'. The Diageo Quality of Life surveys found that 9 per cent trusted the government a great deal to be honest and fair in 2001, and the figure fell to 3 per cent in 2004. With belief in the honesty and fairness of government
becoming a crank theory, like believing that aliens are controlling our thoughts or that Freemasons are running the world, it might seem incredible that voters continued to elect the same politicians. Yet the truth was that many voters didn't greatly care.

Civic morality is not absent in Ireland, but it is marginal and fragile. The political system is tribal, local and clientelist - there is a strong impulse to vote, not for a decent person or a national leader, but for someone who will successfully manipulate the system on behalf of both constituents individually and the constituency as a whole. If morality comes into the equation it is often through the vague but powerful feeling that a lack of it might make for a more effective local champion. Thus, Ray Burke got his highest ever vote in North Dublin in 1977 - after the
Sunday Independent
and
Hibernia
magazine had shown that he had received a bribe of £15,000 from the builders Brennan and McGowan. (There was a Garda investigation but it went nowhere.)

The most spectacular example of this phenomenon in the Celtic Tiger years was the electoral career of Michael Lowry. Lowry had to resign as Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications in 1996 when it emerged that a client of his refrigeration business, Dunnes Stores, had paid for a huge extension to his house - an obvious tax evasion scam. At the 1997 general election, he got an extra 4,000 votes in North Tipperary.

It then became completely clear that Lowry was a cheat and a liar. The McCracken tribunal revealed his evasion of taxes to be complex, organised and large-scale. His company Garuda under-declared both VAT and PAYE, and eventually had to cough up €1.2 million after a Revenue audit. He also diddled his personal taxes, and settled for almost €200,000.
A key part of his business arrangement with Dunnes Stores was described in the McCracken report as ‘a sham' put in place to avoid taxes.

Lowry's lies were legion. He lied to the Revenue when he availed of a tax amnesty in 1993 without declaring all his hidden income - an absolute condition for getting the benefit of the amnesty. (It says much for the standards in Irish public life that Lowry actually told his party leader John Bruton, whose personal integrity is not in doubt, that he had availed of the amnesty - and thus that he had been cheating on his taxes - but was appointed to the cabinet anyway.)

He misled the Dáil in December 1996 by failing to mention a series of large payments from Dunnes. He told the Dáil that if he had been trying to hide money he would have ‘put it in an offshore account', creating the impression that he had no such account. In fact, he had at least four: one in the Bank of Ireland in the Isle of Man; one in an Allied Irish Bank subsidiary in Jersey; another Isle of Man account held through a company called Badgeworth; and an Irish Nationwide Isle of Man account. Only the first two of these accounts were disclosed to the McCracken tribunal - the existence of the other two emerged at the later Moriarty tribunal.

He indignantly denied in the Dáil that ‘my house in Carysfort, Blackrock, was somehow financed in an irregular way'. In fact the house was bought in trust for Lowry by a developer and the money for its extensive refurbishment was routed through the Isle of Man Nationwide account and came from a loan to him from an executive of the giant Smurfit packaging corporation.

Lowry, moreover, has shown no real remorse. He has never apologised. He regards himself, as he told the
Sunday
Independent
in 2009, as ‘a victim of my own success', whose only fault was to ‘stick my head too high above the parapet'. He sees himself as a target of ‘state oppression' who was ‘only judged by the hobnobs'. (Whether the hobnobs in question were of the plain or chocolate-coated variety remains, at the time of writing, unclear.)

And why not? Mr Justice McCracken pointed to the damage done by ‘the public perception that a person in the position of a government minister and member of cabinet was able to ignore, and indeed cynically evade, both the taxation and exchange control laws of the state with impunity'. But that impunity remained in place - Lowry has never been prosecuted for his breaches of those laws.

What happened after the McCracken report? Lowry stood for election again. His effrontery was entirely vindicated: he topped the poll and was elected on the first count. In the 2007 general election, after the Moriarty tribunal had spent many of the intervening years investigating allegations that Lowry, as minister, had fixed the competition for a mobile phone licence, his vote went up again: to a poll-topping 13,000.

Even when politicians were actually prosecuted and convicted of fraud (an event that makes the lunar azure glow seem commonplace), there was no evidence that it did their electoral prospects any harm. In the 2009 local elections, when the disastrous consequences of the refusal to take public ethics seriously ought to have been obvious, two convicted fraudsters were elected.

In 2002, a former Fianna Fáil candidate in Sligo, Michael Clarke, was convicted of handling stolen cheques and conspiring to steal a cheque. Clarke had conspired with an official from the Department of Agriculture to cash cheques
from the department made out to fictitious individuals supposedly involved in a dairy hygiene scheme. After serving his two-year prison sentence, Clarke ran in the 2009 local elections and topped the poll. He explained his success as a matter of trust: ‘People were very kind to me on the doors. They know they can trust me and everything they say to me will remain confidential.'

In the same election, this time in Galway, Michael ‘Stroke' Fahy also topped the poll. Just six months earlier he, too, had been convicted of stealing public money - from the very county council on which he served - by using public workers and funds to erect fencing around his home. The judge in his case called on Fahy ‘to act with honour and resign his seat'. The concept was clearly not one he found easy to fathom. As with Clarke, a criminal conviction actually seemed to increase his appeal. Clarke had failed to win a seat before he went to jail; Fahy significantly increased his vote after being found guilty. When a puzzled local asked on a local internet discussion forum why his neighbours had voted for Fahy (‘I simply find it incomprehensible that corrupt politicians can be elected and re-elected') the reply was that ‘people feel he was wrongly sent to jail, a middle-aged man caring for his mother sent to Castlerea prison for a bit of fencing around the house - a joke'. The real wonder was not that fraudsters got elected but that more politicians did not claim to be crooks in order to get elected. There had been a time in Ireland when it was a political asset to have served time behind bars for Sinn Féin. In the Celtic Tiger era, it was an asset to have been behind bars for Mé Féin.

In most countries, breaking the laws you helped to pass or defrauding the public body on which you served would be seen as exacerbating factors in a crime. In Ireland, bizarrely,
they seem to be accepted as mitigating factors. People who were generally in favour of letting all kinds of criminals rot in hell somehow became bleeding-heart liberals when the criminals were politicians. Instead of locking them up and throwing away the key, they were all in favour of care in the community, preferably in the safe and supportive environment of a parliament or county council.

Why did this attitude prevail? The localism and clientelism of Irish politics was a large factor. Politicians were elected, not necessarily to implement impersonal policies or standards, but to provide a service both to individual constituents and to the constituency as a whole. Helping a voter to get a local authority house or the area as a whole to get a new road or school covered a multitude of sins. Oddly enough, the extreme experience of globalisation in Ireland may have enhanced these factors. As a reaction to the idea of faceless, fluid forces shaping one's destiny, an extreme of local loyalty and of personal intimacy (‘a middle-aged man caring for his mother') is an act of defiance against Them - whoever they are. Doing the last thing you're supposed to do may be the final assertion of power against a feeling of power lessness.

There was, however, another reason for this reaction - bizarrely, the revelations and inquiries themselves. Because knowledge did not lead to action and the same system remained in place, the ultimate impact of the certainty that there was deep corruption in Irish politics was cynicism about politics itself. Voters got to watch their leaders developing unfortunate memory loss in sworn inquiries. They saw the operation of
omertà
, as big political players were protected and defended by their colleagues while the small fry were abandoned to their fate. They witnessed the ruthlessness
with which loyalties were abandoned or restored, as a figure like Haughey went from paragon to pariah to patriot, as the Party's needs dictated. Instead of raising standards, the revelations inadvertently lowered them. The broad public response to the stripping away of the illusions of patriotism and public service was the belief that all politics are corrupt. Politicians, in the favoured cliché, were ‘in it for themselves'.

This was patently untrue, but it was not an irrational response to a situation in which outright racketeering is revealed at the highest levels of state and nothing really happens. And what flowed logically from it was the bizarre notion that, since they were all corrupt, anyone who was actually caught was simply being singled out by those evil biscuits, Michael Lowry's ‘hobnobs'. Why were they going after a good Tipperary man when there were so many rogues in Dublin? Why were they blaming poor Stroke Fahy, who was good to his ancient mother, for stealing a bit of fencing off the council when Charlie Haughey was ‘a patriot to his fingergtips'?

What happened was a perverse application of the conclusion that Mr Justice McCracken had reached in his report in 1997. McCracken wrote of Lowry that ‘If such a person can behave in this way without serious sanctions being imposed, it becomes very difficult to condemn others who similarly flout the law'. The good judge's assumption was presumably that Lowry and others like him would be punished and that basic standards of morality and legality would be laid down once and for all. With impunity for Lowry, Haughey and vastly wealthy businessmen like the Bailey brothers, that assumption was turned on its head. How, indeed, could anyone be condemned for flouting the law (unless of course they were drawn from the usual reservoir of poverty and chaos
that was regularly drained into the prisons) when some of the most egregious political criminals got away with it?

It took a little while for those in power (in effect, Fianna Fáil) to understand what was going on. In the early years of the corruption revelations, Fianna Fáil felt the need to be seen to be taking a tough line, not just on those who accepted bribes, but on those who gave them and enriched themselves as a result. In the party manifesto for the 2002 election, and subsequently in the Programme for Government, Fianna Fáil promised that it would introduce ‘a Proceeds of Corruption Act modelled on the proceeds of crime legislation, to further target white-collar crime and corruption in both public and private sectors'. After the Flood tribunal report, Bertie Ahern put flesh on these bones: the Corruption Assets Bureau would ‘recover assets corruptly obtained and . . . recover any increase in the value of an asset that has been obtained through corruption . . . Those who benefit from corrupting public officials and those holding elective office must, in addition to criminal sanctions, be held financially accountable. Such persons must be hit where it hurts most - in their pockets.'