Ni Water: Questions for the Minister…
Interesting to hear Paul Maskey push the line that his Minister took swift and decisive action on members of the NI Water Board. But if his Permanent Secretary’s position is now untenable, so too must be the report on foot of which the Minister sacked the Board. You might have thought.
As Jamie Delargy noted this evening on UTV, no one would accept a chief constable having a say in a report into the death of a child in police custody? Why should it be any different with an investigation into NI Water?
That report actually unleashed a witch hunt inside NI Water, but not DRD. Before this gets tidied neatly away under the carpet, the Minister (and/or his Special Advisor Stephen McGlade) should at the very least be asked the following questions:
- Why was the Board put under investigation before they had had a chance to respond to the internal review detailing breaches of departmental protocol?
- Why was no one in DRD’s Stakeholder Unit (who met with NI Water’s management 82 times per year, as opposed to the Board’s ten) put under investigation?
- Why did he retain the one Director who had closest oversight of the Audit process, Don Price, and sack another who began work on the same day, Declan Gormley?
- How did the Minister respond to Priestly’s email of 18th March asking to start the process of recruitment of the new Board (four days before the IRT finished taking submissions)?
And I am going to throw in two more lengthy ones from Jim Allister:
- How was the Independent Review Team (IRT) into NIW appointed, what links existed between those appointed and NIW/DRD personnel, why did the IRT permit the DRD Permanent Secretary to meddle in its work and rewrite aspects of its report and, in consequence, is there a case for recouping public money paid to those who permitted their independence to be compromised?
- Is there a history of abuse of power regarding supposedly independent reviews, both within DRD and other departments and how widespread is the culture which caused a Permanent Secretary to feel able to act as he did?[Emphasis added]
You can catch up on the substance of this story at UTV…
History tells us that public bodies are very, very reluctant to have the PSNI involved, on the basis that it might lead to the legal system becoming involved.
It would have been much, much better for the likes of Declan Gormley to have been charged with something. I’m not exactly sure what this might have been, but let us assume ‘gross negligence with public cash’ (if such an offence exists).
To have done so would have meant that DRD/NIW would have needed to present a case in court. Production of destroyed emails, that sort of thing. Mr. Gormley would have had the right to a ‘defence’ of his actions. Currently he doesn’t really have any, and even three or four sentences on a TV programme don’t constitute a proper defence or full explanation..
PAC have (hitherto) not allowed him a ‘defence’ either, possibly the genesis of Mr. Dallat’s ‘show trials’ remark. In fact DRD/NIW have kind of ‘perverted the course of justice’ in acting in a manner that doesn’t allow full disclosure of events on which to determine (in my opinion) and the PAC members allow this to happen. A major flaw and failing in the whole existence of PAC.
So as things stand, Mr. Gormley stands accused, with a cloud over him, and no right of reply to the machinery of government, and no way to prove his innocence. In a proper court of law, as opposed to the NIA/PAC’s kangaroo variant, all charges dropped and his reputation clean as a whistle.
As things stand, he is stuck with that cloud. And THAT is a matter that needs investigating and reforming as a matter of urgency. We simply cannot continue with a system where individuals are hung by government departments/agencies/utilities this way, and often on the basis of the word of an anonymous (or in this rare case, known) individual.
Reform would need to include a right of reply to PAC (in this instance) and the understanding of expectations to proceed directly to the courts, where such allegations of wrongdoing (or more likely, no wrongdoing) can be tested before a proper court of law. And we maybe need to look at linking all of this to other mechanisms, where those accused and victimised have a right to sue for ‘wrongful accusation’. Perhaps ‘defamation’ and ‘libel’ are the best laws to cover this. Parliament needs to look at a variant of these (‘industrial libel’ as a law? ‘commercial libel’?) and offer them to the ‘victims’. With these sort of mechanisms in place it might make others more wary of tossing accusations around that have no basis in fact, but the effect of casting a cloud over people’s lives and careers).