I’m told Mr. Justice Frederick Morris is seriously cheesed off at the slow pace of his inquiry into Garda corruption in Donegal.
Could it be, I wonder, that some of the officials attached to his Tribunal are less than enthusiastic about pursuing the truth?
The Tribunal was established by an Oireachtas resolution four years ago. So far, it has published two reports. Both were vigorously written: little of the arcane language legal people sometimes hide behind. Or hide uncomfortable truths behind. The brisk tone has earned Morris a positive press.
The Tribunal was scheduled to resume hearings, in private, on February 1st, on the “Burnfoot module.” This focuses on an arms find at a Traveller encampment near the Donegal village in May 1998 and the detention of seven people in relation to the find.
Morris has already reported on the 1985 discovery of an arms cache near Bridgend, a few miles from Burnfoot. Or, rather, he hasn’t. He heard evidence from witnesses about the find, but decided not to mention it in the 500-page report published in July 2004. What he reported, in effect, was that there was nothing to report.
One witness who’d given evidence about the Bridgend arms cache, local man Jim Smith, wrote to Morris asking on what basis it had been decided that his testimony, and that of another man who’d given evidence about the same incident, had been dismissed as unworthy of mention. Not unexpectedly, the Tribunal responded that it didn’t enter into discussions of that sort.
The guard allegedly at the centre of the Bridgend incident was Superintendent Kevin Lennon, sacked in October 2004 on foot of Morris’s finding that he had helped orchestrate the discovery of the fake IRA arms and explosive dumps across Donegal on which Morris did, damningly, report in July.
However, there was nothing fake about the Bridgend dump which Smith and the other witness had testified about. The local IRA quartermaster of the time confirmed the existence of the dump in an interview with hotpress, and the fact that the contents had been seized by Gardai. He said that he had shared the bewilderment of local people that the discovery of the dump had gone entirely unreported at the time: “You’d have thought the guards would have wanted to publicise a success for their own side.”
Many observers were puzzled by the fact that the July 2004 report – even though it had prompted the government to sack senior Gardai – -wasn’t debated in the Dail for almost a year. Puzzlement then deepened when former Fianna Fail minister and Donegal North East TD Jim McDaid didn’t show up for the debate. The matters revealed by Morris were, by some distance, the most sensational in the history of the deputy’s constituency. But, seemingly, he wasn’t interested enough to drop by the Dail chamber. Mr. McDaid did, however, comment on a finding by Morris which had nothing obvious to do with political or paramilitary manoeuvres but which, rightly, had attracted wide public attention and concern – that gardai had attempted to frame Frank McBrearty and his cousin Mark O’Connell for the murder of road accident victim Richie Barron in 1996.
In an intervention as intriguing as it was unexpected, the TD suggested that perhaps Mr. Barron had been murdered after all.
What Justice Morris makes of this dense, tangled web, we can but speculate. To some extent, he’s dependent for his initial understanding of the areas he explores on the two investigators hired on behalf of the Department of Justice to conduct preliminary enquiries. One of these is a former garda, Michael Finn, a man well-used to high-profile, controversial cases, having played a prominent part in the investigation of the Sallins mail train robbery in the 1970s. Garda Finn was mentioned, for example, on a number of occasions during evidence relating to one of the defendants in the Sallins case, Nicky Kelly.
Of course, there is no connection between the Sallins case and the matters before Morris. And there may be no connection, either, between the slow pace of Morris’s inquiries and the impression of some potential witnesses and potential witnesses that the Inquiry doesn’t want to hear everything they have to say.
In an atmosphere of suspicion and near paranoia, a local person talking to a representative of the Tribunal may come to feel that he or she is being discouraged from telling all they know about a particular incident. The feeling may be based on nothing more than the pervasive atmosphere.
Similarly, it’s possible for people in the circumstances of the case to feel they’ve been put under threat when, in fact, no threat has been intended. It would be unfortunate were such a feeling to arise during exchanges with a Tribunal official, and doubly unfortunate if a citizen was thereby dissuaded from informing the Tribunal of everything of relevance which they know.
As he heads into what he hopes will be the final stretch of his long search for the truth, Judge Morris might consider whether the pace of proceeding might be enhanced were he to have a word with his staff about the importance of avoiding such misunderstandings.
The Catholic Bishop of Galway, Dr. Martin Drennan, never spoke a truer word than when he said last month that Catholic schools are “necessary...to pass on the faith.”
He was responding to Seán Cottrell, national director of the Irish Primary Principals Network, who’d claimed that, “The day is gone when organised religion in denominational form is required to govern and manage schools.”
Mr. Cottrell added that responsibility for religious education and preparing children for sacraments should be removed from schools and given back to the family “where it rightfully belonged.”
Dr. Drennan was evidently dismayed. Perhaps Mr. Cottrell was suffering from “the isolation and alienation felt by teachers who need support in the faith formation of children,” he suggested.
It’s also possible, of course, that Mr Cottrell was feeling neither isolated nor alienated but was simply expressing the view that it wasn’t the function of the educational system to “pass on” the beliefs of any Church?
However, this doesn’t invalidate the bishop’s key point, that Catholic schools are “necessary” if future generations are to continue to be Catholic. If children were not instructed day in and day out from the age of four or even earlier absolutely to believe, say, that a piece of bread contains the flesh and blood of a man who may have lived 2,000 years ago, how many would otherwise arrive at this conclusion?
It is crucial for the Catholic Church that it keeps control of the institutions in which children are “formed” for the future. It is for this reason that, given a choice between retaining the role governments have allowed them in education since the formation of the State and keeping the ban on abortion, the Catholic bishops would be parading in full regalia down O’Connell Street with the Right to Choose placards in the morning.
“Socialism is a way of trying to put far-fetched ideas into everyday use, of reaching out across the gap between fantasy and reality to actually do something to make change” – Pete Doherty, genius with a very Derry name.