The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Moriarty Report…redux March 23, 2011

I don’t know if I’m alone in having this sense that the ultimate outcome of the Moriarty Report hangs in the balance. There’s no end of spinning going on, and there’s almost a feeling that the findings arrived at by Moriarty may well be dismissed by the excuse that they’re simply ‘opinion’.
Well, perhaps so, but having flicked through both volumes of the Reports that’s quite a lot of research that backs up those opinions. And no end of familiar names too. Some surprisingly familiar, some with an ‘emotional involvement’ as noted here over the last day or two.

What’s perhaps most odd about all this is how the door opened by Moriarty yawns into the dim and distant past of a decade and a half ago, and yet that in doing so it brings into a stark and unforgiving light how much of then is still with us now. Read the report and the list of names, political, business and otherwise, who are contained within are still on the stage, some of them in higher positions than then, some in less exalted ones. But still around and some only very recently moved back into positions of power and authority.

Will that blunt in some fashion the findings? Will a political inertia to act or to do anything much see this report fade into insignificance? I’m not so sure. Perhaps, but there will be effects.

Someone noted yesterday that this represented the end of the honey moon for the government, and in a most unwelcome way. God knows what the effects might have been had it been released prior to the election. But it casts a cool chill over the first almost summery weeks of the government and from a rather unexpected quarter.

If one considers the editorials in the Irish Independent and Irish Times today it’s also fascinating to see a fairly sharp divergence. Both pull their punches, but one to a much greater extent than the other.

The Independent tip toes up to the central issue and then glances away:

The two people most involved, former minister Michael Lowry and businessman Denis O’Brien, flatly deny the accusations made by Mr Justice Moriarty in his mammoth report.

That is hardly surprising as the findings could not be more grave: accusing them, not just of serious abuse of the licensing process, but rejecting their evidence given under oath.
Judging from their comments, they may well return to the courts, asking for the Moriarty conclusions to be overturned or set aside.

One cannot say how the courts will respond, but it is a legal route that could re-open the hugely complex evidence, at further significant cost to the taxpayer. We have not seen such flat denials of tribunal findings before; certainly not in the payments to the late C J Haughey, which were the subject of the first Moriarty Report. This can only add to a feeling in some quarters that, whatever the value of tribunals as currently constituted, the process and the attendant expense need to be reassessed.

Perhaps so, but it’s telling, is it not, that it doesn’t itself offer an appraisal of the evidence.
By contrast the Irish Times is nowhere near as reserved. Under the heading ‘If it walks like a duck’, it notes that:

IT MAY not have the impact and clarity of the McCracken report that found the late Charles Haughey to be a “kept man” of Irish business, but the findings of the Moriarty tribunal are no less damning: Michael Lowry received payments of up to half a million pounds from businessman Denis O’Brien in circumstances that suggested a linkage with his position as minister for transport, energy and communications and the granting of a mobile phone licence.

And it continues with a sentence that more than echoes the Independent editorial:

It is no surprise that Mr Lowry and Mr O’Brien have challenged the findings of Mr Justice Moriarty. They have been engaged in a public war of attrition for years. Mr Lowry held the report to be factually wrong, misleading and an abuse of power while Mr O’Brien maintained he had never made any payment to Mr Lowry and suggested the judiciary should investigate the tribunal chairman and its legal team. Such diversionary tactics should be ignored.

The two-volume report recalls that, had Mr Haughey not been unwell in 1999 and delayed matters, the tribunal would have concluded there was no reason to investigate the relationship between Mr O’Brien and Mr Lowry. Important information, it says, was withheld. That material only became available in 2001 and in 2009 after “false and contrived documentation” had been exposed. Payments and benefits were conveyed to Mr Lowry by persons intimately associated with Mr O’Brien. This gave rise to a reasonable inference that they were connected with his position as minister. A payment of £147,000 was made to Lowry within months of the Esat contract being signed. Payments and benefits amounting to £342,000 followed.

While the Irish Times laments the costs and length of the process, though in truth while they are extravagant and it is hardly unreasonable to hope that much more expedient structures could be put in place there is a point and purpose to them – if one believes in a probing gaze of such matters, though some don’t, it goes nowhere near so far as the Independent which argues:

Neither our legal system, nor even our social attitudes, sit easily with the notion of a finding based essentially on opinion, which is the essence of our tribunal process.

The Supreme Court, in the Abbeylara case, actually restricts the right to make findings which can subsequently adversely affect individuals in the courts and legal tribunals.
In such circumstances, it might be better all round to let the report be laid before the Oireachtas, those involved make their case, and a line be finally drawn under this controversy.

Really? Does the editorial writer genuinely believe that that would be satisfactory? And what would be the outcome of such an approach? How would it be intended to materially impact upon those who cases were found wanting?

Mind you, it’s not as if there are no outcomes. If there were ever a hint, a smidgen, an inkling of a chance that the former ‘best friend…best friend forever’ would be readmitted to Fine Gael any time soon this must surely torpedo that beneath the waterline.

And for all the that the oppositional discourse in this state has often centered upon Fianna Fáil as the focus of our woes this is a salutary reminder that the way business is sometimes done is by no means restricted to a single political home or culture.