ALBERT’S YELLOW STREAK

REMEMBER the Beef Tribunal? Forget it. There were other issues, too, which might have brought Reynolds to grief before now, and didn’t. But he could well come a cropper even yet, over Parkingate.

First it was passports for pet-food. A million green ones, likely as not in used notes and wrapped up in a brown paper parcel – and for all I know handed over in the car park of a grant-aided Westmeath hotel in the dead of night, and lodged next morning by a man in a furtive raincoat to the account of Albert Reynolds’ dog-food firm – and within hours a couple of Irish passports with the ink not dry on them are on their way to the London address of a Middle Eastern business-person that nobody has been able to find a photo of. Strange, that.

But it was all totally OK and within the existing guidelines which were immediately changed to prevent it ever happening again.

Then there was the poisoning of the ocean by a Niagara of noxious effluent gushing from the Reynolds’ family factory at Edgeworthstown into the aptly-named (at least it is now) River Black and flowing along the nation’s waterways killing salmon, algae and playful otters before splurging toxically into the sea and billowing out over the Atlantic to result eventually in bloated dolphins and wheezing whales dying horribly and being pitifully washed up all along the coastline of the New World from the shores from Newfoundland to the Copacabana beach.

And that was all OK, too, because no charges were brought after everybody said sorry and it won’t ever happen again either, on account of tax-payers’ dosh having been deployed to install a new filter gizmo.

Also there was the revelation that property owned by members of the Reynolds family and currently valued at nine pounds, ten and sixpence will shortly be worth as much as the Taj Mahal as a result of a scheme to enhance the visual aesthetic of downtown Longford where, by happy chance, the building is located. This is completely OK as well, the plan having been properly approved by an appropriate authority and everybody agreeing that with the healthy scattering of in-houses and out-houses the Reynolds family has an interest in, it would be strange indeed if a couple of their oul brick-piles weren’t to be found in the designated area.

But Parkingate could be different.

When it comes to criminal charges being withdrawn in open court without a scintilla of evidence having been presented, for no apparent reason whatsoever other than the possibility of Albert Reynolds being inconvenienced, then it’s time for all who cherish our fragile democracy to stand up and shout Stop!

The Parkingate Affair unfolded at Longford District Court earlier this month. The democratically-elected Urban District Council had brought appropriate charges against the registered owners of a car which had been found parked on a stretch of the main street of the town clearly marked with double yellow lines.

The owners of the vehicle were identified in court as Mel Donlon and Sons Limited. But in a sensational development it was revealed that at the time the crime was committed the car had been hired out by Mel and his Sons . . . to an Albert Reynolds of Dublin Road, Longford. It was alleged in court, and was not denied, that this is none other than the current Taoiseach.

This revelation was followed by mysterious interplay between Ms. Lorna Groake for Mel and his Sons, a Mr. Farrell for the Urban District Council, and Judge O’Donnell for the people of Ireland. Mr. Farrell informed the court that the council had sought proof of the hire contract but had not received same.

Ms. Groake, although not challenging the allegation that the hire contract had been between her clients, Mel and the Sons, and Taoiseach Reynolds, said that she was not personally aware who had hired the car. “It was a hired car and that is as far as I can put it.”

She went on: “I’m sure Mr. Farrell does not want me to bring Mr. Reynolds here. I think he has better things to be doing.”

Mr. Farrell appears to have made no reply to this bizarre statement. But Judge O’Donnell, in an intervention from the bench, declared that: “I suspect he (that is, Reynolds) has (better things to be doing)”. And so saying, he struck the charge out!

This entire affair bristles with deeply disturbing questions. How could Ms. Groake, who had presumably been briefed by Mel and/or the Sons, not have been aware of the identity of the person they had hired out the car to? What steps had she herself taken to establish who the hirer was? Had she sought the information and been refused it? If so, by whom? Or had she chosen not to delve into this area at all?

Why? What lay behind her confidence that Mr. Farrell, representing the local democratic interest, would not want her to fetch Mr. Reynolds into court to clear the matter up? How could she be “sure” he would take this view?

Why did Mr. Farrell choose not to rebut Ms. Groake’s assumption? Had he been instructed to take this course by someone representing – or purporting to represent – Longford Urban District Council?

Why did Judge O’Donnell, representing the national democratic interest, agree so readily that Mr. Reynolds likely had “better things to be doing”? We can take it that he had different things to be doing. But “better”? There is a political value-judgement inherent in that statement which is surely out of place in a pronouncement from the bench.

If Mr. Reynolds did have “better things to be doing” on that particular day, why has the public not been told what these “better things” were, so that we can make up our own minds? Why – up to the time of writing – has Mr. Reynolds made no personal statement about his own role, if any, in the matter? Did he park the car on the double yellow line? Or was the culprit, perhaps, someone impersonating Mr. Reynolds? Or is Mr. Reynolds shielding some miscreant, for reasons about which we can but speculate?

Where was Sean Duignan? Was it coincidence that shortly after the collapse of the case, Mr. Reynolds vanished from his usual haunts in the Dublin, Longford/Westmeath and Nashville areas and has since been reported sailing in the Mediterranean Sea on a yacht owned by a Mexican billionaire, maintaining omerta? And where is Sean Duignan now? And isn’t Groake a strange name? Not a Longford woman, I suspect.

And given that we are all equal before the law, the next time any of us might be required in court, can we drop the judge a letter saying that we have better things to be doing than helping the process of justice and would he ever just strike the charge out like a good man?

And how are we to account for the eerie silence of the rest of the media on the Parkingate Affair?

A LOAD OF OLD BILL!

The upcoming Leinster House debate on Judge Hamilton’s report from the Beef Tribunal will not get to the bottom of the matter, because no TD will be willing to say straight that the report is a whitewash.

Since the report’s publication, all of those involved in the original series of allegations, counter-allegations, denials and deceits have been striving to show that their particular position has been vindicated by Judge Hamilton’s findings. This requires each of them to operate on an assumption that Hamilton’s report is full, fair and final.

Media commentators who might have been expected to take a more sceptical view have also approached the report with a needless reverence. One or two have expressed surprise at the tentative nature of some of Hamilton’s conclusions when the evidence for a more definitive finding appeared to be available to him. But they have then shrunk from drawing any clear conclusion themselves.

To date, only this column has declared without equivocation that the Hamilton Report should not be taken as full, fair and final. That, on the contrary, it is a whitewash.

The widespread reluctance to reject the report can be partly explained by the fact that to say that the whole truth hasn’t come out is to suggest a need for further enquiries, and hardly anybody has the energy for that. As well, there’s a tendency among mainstream politicians and journalists who associate with them to shy away from direct criticism of institutions of State – particularly in relatively “young” States, like southern Ireland, where intimations of instability are still occasionally, unsettlingly experienced.

This is the underlying reason investigations into, for example, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974 are more likely to be undertaken by the British than by the Irish media; it is relevant to the refusal of RTE to examine the events surrounding the entry into the Northern troubles of British troops 25 years ago; not to mention that it was Granada Television and not RTE or an Irish newspaper which broke the story which precipitated the Beef Tribunal in the first place.

The Granada journalist mainly responsible for unearthing the key elements of the story was Susan O’Keefe, a researcher on World In Action. Many might agree that a quiet tribute to her in the text of the report would not have been out of place. But what happened instead is that the programme was accused by Hamilton of “unethical” behaviour in the way it edited a speech by Ray McSharry.

In a report of more than 1,000 pages, dealing inter alia with tax evasion on a massive scale, the fraudulent mis-identification of goods for export, the putting at risk of more than £100 million of public money to cover these goods, the payment to a political party of sums totalling £170,000 by a company doing business with that party in government, the illegal intervention by government ministers of that party to change the terms under which public funds had been made available to the same company – in the course of dealing with all this, and more, Judge Hamilton did not think it appropriate to use, even once, the word “unethical”. But he used it about World In Action.

And not one public figure or commentator has said in plain terms that that passage of the report at least should be rejected.

As far as many of the public were concerned, the main question Hamilton had to answer was whether Goodman had a personal or political association with Haughey or Reynolds which might have affected the way his companies were treated by government. Hamilton finds all concerned innocent on all counts. “There is no evidence to suggest that either (Haughey or Reynolds) was personally close to Mr. Goodman or had any political associations with either of them or the party they represented.”

But Reynolds had given evidence that he had known Goodman for a quarter of a century and had included him on the guest list for his daughter’s wedding. Contrary to what Hamilton says, that is “evidence to suggest” a personal closeness between the two men. And, again contrary to Hamilton’s assertion, the payment by Goodman of £170,000 to Fianna Fail is “evidence to suggest” a political association with the party.

Yet, again, as far as I’m aware, although there have been a few timid hints and expressions of puzzlement, no politician or commentator has said plainly that these findings by Hamilton should forthrightly be rejected.

The general effect of the report and of reaction so far to it has been to reassure the political and business establishment that there’s no need for nervousness. There’s no crisis. No institution is to crumble, no major politician need slink off into obscurity and shame, no entrepreneur is likely to serve time in Mountjoy. Everybody is in the clear! Or everybody of importance anyway.

That’s the way things will remain unless people of influence begin to dare to question the report itself, and there’s no sign of that happening.

We have no difficulty rubbishing reports of this sort from across the water. We feel free to denounce the report of Sir John May into the circumstances surrounding the convictions of the Guildford Four. Lord Widgery’s report on Bloody Sunday seems now to be accepted by nobody at all. The judicial ruling that cases should be dropped against police allegedly involved in vicious attacks on people picketing Rupert Murdoch’s plant at Wapping brought forth howls of protest, and not only from liberals and leftists. And so on.

But when it comes to “our own” we appear petrified into attitudes of obeisance.

Judicial inquiries and tribunals of one sort and another are best seen as one of the mechanisms the State has available to handle malfunctions in the system. The purpose is to repair the system, not to acknowledge that it might be the system itself which is at fault.

Business as usual!

GAS ME ALTOGETHER

It may be true, as they say, that the Féile at Thurles died peacefully in its sleeplessness a few weeks back, but the Féile at the Gasyard Wall has just emerged bawling into life and seems set for a long, lusty run.

The Gasyard Wall in the Bogside doesn’t exist any more other than in the words of the Phil Coulter anthem ‘The Town I Love So Well’ which some people in Derry are said to be very fond of, although personally I find it difficult to believe that the man who wrote the sharp and sensitive ‘Scorn Not His Simplicity’ was capable of dipping his pen in syrup to produce such dollops of goo. But then there’s no accounting for taste. It could be me that’s wrong, although it’s not. Anyway.

The Gasyard and its wall were demolished a few years back to leave a huge space in the heart of the Bogside which has been crying out ever since for occupation by a commensurate project. Dutch Doherty, Hawks Collins, Mary Gallagher, Sean Semple and an army of others have come up with the answer, for one weekend at least. A four-day open-air rock festival with all the additional fun of the fair, coinciding with any number of anniversaries but with its face set fair to the future.

Set in an open space in a densely populated area, with no admission charge, police presence or perimeter security, and featuring 19 bands drawn almost exclusively from the Derry area (Blink and Ash were the obvious exceptions) it was, as intended, a well-rooted community rock festival.

Organised to high technical standards, and with a steep escarpment behind the stage area leading up to the local GAA ground seeming to create a perfect soundscape, it drew audiences of 3,000-plus over each of the four nights, virtually all from the surrounding neighbourhood, which is, so to speak, saturation coverage.

What it needed to top off its triumph was a band that looked and sounded like it could walk onto any stage anywhere and blow minds at first encounter but which yet exuded anger and uplift specific to its time and its place, and it found the apt sight and sound, not unexpectedly, in Schtum.

Christian McNeill’s men release the first single off their top-of-the-range Sony deal next month, which could be the moment which defines 1994 as the year of Schtum’s emergence. That’ll have an undertow of irony about it for those who know that Christian and guitar-man Ivan have been working on their stuff in some fledgling form or other for about six years now.

For the moment, they followed up the frantically anthemic ‘Big City’ on Saturday night, all soaring vocals and multiple-crash chords and a rhythm section like Thor was syncopating thunder, with the first public sounding-off of ‘Space’, a cri-de-coeur from Bogside X Generation hurled into the sky, which could fizz and crackle down along any antennae thrust upwards from the yearning of Protestant Nelson Drive on the other side of the oblivious river.

“ . . . life can be as cheap as magazines/There is no repentance, everybody’s sentenced . . . How the guilt I feel sometimes/Does nothing to numb the fear of everything I can’t see . . . How the things I see sometimes/Do nothing to help me understand how wrong we have been . . . Who knows what they’ll do to my country/The disease is insignificance on this rock in space.”

A Dublin writer recently described Christian as “promising”, which is nonsense. He’s already as accomplished a frontman as there is in the land, with as much natural stage presence as the very different Matthew Devereux, which in my book is a mighty thing. He has great vocal range, a high sense of drama, a palpable muscularity and a nice air of mischief.

The band is tightly together and bursting with self-confidence, and they have very good people around them for the short, dangerous dash into new upland territory which they are about to embark on. Plus they have good songs.

I mentioned to McNeill in the Gweedore the next night that if he had been born in the Middle East he might easily have been called Muslim McNeill, which he might care to change his name to as a gesture of cross-cultural defiance . . .? “I have to see Seamus,” he explained with furtive eyes, and scurried into a snug where there was no-one called Seamus. But I think they’ll get there even so.