More on the O’Brien/Murphy ‘you can’t say that’ controversy…

From Michael McDowell in the Irish Times today pointing to a massive contradiction at the heart of this and underlining just how pernicious the curtailing of parliamentary privilege is:

We now also have the ridiculous situation in which O’Brien’s spokesman uses the airwaves to condemn Deputy Murphy for “peddling lies” in the Dáil but listeners are not told what her allegation is and are in no position to judge for themselves whether the spokesman’s strident condemnation is itself true or not. That is pathetic and ludicrous.

And good sense here:

Deputy Murphy’s speech was firmly grounded in the public domain; it did not concern the private, intimate, domestic borrowings or banking affairs of just anyone or just any businessman. The nature of her concerns and their scale in my view takes the matter well outside the “private” in the personal sense of that term. If her remarks concerned a company’s affairs, no one would see them as in any way “private”, even though many companies are private.

The size of an individual’s business banking relations may be of such an order as takes them far outside the scope of citizen “privacy” rights protected by the Constitution. In that area, “size matters”.

And:

We are in dangerous territory where the alleged privacy rights of the powerful call into question the freedom of speech of our parliamentarians and of the citizens’ right to know of such matters, and seem to cast doubt on the efficacy of Article 15.12 of our Constitution.

Fair dues.

One thing that is evident is just how absurd all this is. McDowell’s use of the term ludicrous is spot on, and it’s something that has to be said again and again, because it is one very clear means to undermine the toxicity of the processes we have seen over the last week. All this is – obviously – useful, in terms of underlining the manner in which power is distributed and exercised in this society.