The Sarah Everard murder is the stuff of nightmares. A serving police officer, Wayne Couzens showed a warrant card and used handcuffs as he kidnapped Ms Everard before her rape and murder. Thankfully he was caught fairly quickly and he will spend the rest of his days behind bars. But the Met has a lot to do to restore public confidence in the police, especially amongst women. If you have not watched it yet the BBC documentary Bent Coppers: Crossing …
RTE INVESTIGATES: Professor Gary Murphy of DCU argues that Ireland is a society where the past is indeed a foreign country; a foreign country where citizens bemoaned the private influence that riddled the public policy process but did very little about it. Perhaps they will do so now but perhaps we should not hold our breath.
STAND UP: Politicians can and must grasp this nettle. For too long they have feared repercussions. No more can that be accepted. We need a range of censures. One might possibly overlook a declaration of something very small on a form and be reprimanded in a small way, but a conflict of interest should carry a severe penalty.
BROWN ENVELOPES: Dan Boyle argues that the revelations in the recent RTE Investigates programme into corruption at council level are just another nod to a long standing culture that is defensive and unwilling to see obvious realities. The instinct of the traditional political system is to defend its collective honour, rather than admit that corruption exists in any form, needing to be quashed.
Sinn Fein pulled an initial blinder last night: one, by not turning up for the Nolan Show and letting Gregory Campbell explain the nuances of the Panel Report all on his own; and two getting the host Stephen Nolan read out their key messages on their behalf. However, in the longer run not speaking about it, leave the field open to your opponents to define the ground on which this issue gets unpacked. The problematic linking of ongoing IRA criminality …
As the Irish Times reports Former Minister of State, Ned O’Keeffe has been fined €3,500 and given a suspended seven month jail sentence after he pleaded guilty to five counts of submitting false invoices to claim over €3,700 in mobile phone expenses. O’Keeffe of Ballylough, Mitchelstown, Co Cork was arrested by gardaí this morning and brought before Cork District Court where he was charged with five offences contrary to Section 26 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act. …
The Council of Europe is a Strasbourg based international organisation concerned with the development of legal and judicial structures in member countries. It is not part of the EU, and its recommendations are advisory rather than mandatory. There’s a report out today from one of their programmes flagging up some concerns about corruption in Ireland the details of which are well worth considering. Interesting, it praises the increasing transparency of the parliamentary process. That’s not to say that some inside the …
Had to do a double take on this one this morning… Vincent Browne points to a number of cases that have passed unnoticed under the gaze of Dublin’s parliamentarians (not least Ireland’s wealthiest media tycoon, Denis O’Brien).. While Vincent is not arguing that Mick the Builder (from Wexford) is not deserving of censure, …in a normal, decent society, he would be deserving of censure and of the appropriate criminal sanctions. …he does, however, muddy the waters somewhat by getting in …
Seven days ago, Elaine Byrne finally got the review her important book on the history of political corruption in Ireland really deserved in the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole. In that review he notes. …impunity is not just legal but can also be moral, social and political. Kohl, the man who unified Germany, was destroyed, humiliated and ostracised. Here no great shame is attached to adverse findings from a tribunal. The two central figures in the grim story of the …
Bearing in mind some of the moral issues raised by the proposed boycott of the Household Charge, Fintan O’Toole nails a few home truths in his Irish Times column (h/t to the peerless and sainted Olivia O’Leary on RTE’s Drivetime this evening): We can’t take refuge, either, in comforting explanations for this deep-rooted amorality. The pat answer would be to link it to the decline of religion and in particular of the authority of institutional Catholicism. But the facts don’t …
Given FIFA sponsors are getting itchy over allegations of corruption amongst some of it’s highest placed officials, it’s worth asking whether this was something like the “black hole” Sepp Blatter had in mind when he argued the organisation had no alternative but to vote him back into office tomorrow: ” Nevertheless, it is worthwhile outlining what the alternative would be, i.e. none at all. “What applies for every carpenter also applies for us: the roof will only hold as long …
