What do the Taoiseach’s response to the Fennelly Report and an Opposition Leader, Micheal Martin’s, response last week to questions raised by the PSI, Northern Ireland, as to whether the IRA still exists have in common? And what does the RTE documentary on the training of Army Recruits have to add?
Did the Taoiseach,
Enda Kenny, show presidential style leadership in 2014 in the midst of revelatory
reports, official and unofficial, that were unravelling trust in the Department
of Justice and the Gardai? Or did he overstep his brief while demonstrating
more of the technical ethics – where the rule but not the spirit of the law is
honoured – we have come to expect in public life: an expectation that continues
to erode confidence in Irish and International politics?
As with our eroding
coastline that - where possible - continues to be restored when funding and the
political will allows, when the erosion has gone too far nothing can be done
except to shore up what remains. This is a dangerous business. When law and
order breaks down it’s a long road back to restoring sufficient trust in
politics to build peace.
The slow and
frustrating road to that restoration is something Micheal Martin should know
about. He was a Minister in successive Fianna Fail governments engaged in the
painfully slow peace process required to enable a return to the rule of an elected
Northern Ireland Assembly. Those in the
front-line of organisations who took up arms (whether you call it terrorism or
war) when they no longer believed the political system could, or had the
stomach to, deliver an adequately just society had to be particularly patient.
They had to act with painstaking attention to detail as they both negotiated
peace and led their former – or present, at the time – organisations to
continue to take steps for peace and to put their trust in politics instead of
the bullet.
Ironically, it
may have been the now relatively normal context that led a Senior Northern
Ireland police officer to choose the words he did last week, rather than the
more carefully phrased sentences that have come since - familiar over the long
years of a return to peace in Northern Ireland. The Statement from a member of the PSI (Police
Service in Northern Ireland) that the IRA was still in existence to a degree
and that members are suspects in the investigation of a murder might not have
been phrased that way in the immediate winning of a return to politics and the
putting beyond use of weaponry held by the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries.
The
remains of an organisation, now with strong criminal elements, is not at all
the same thing as the former organisation itself. It is generally understood
that former members of all the paramilitaries have variously turned to active
politics or to criminality, while others have retired entirely. The failure to
spend enough money to resolve the societal inequities that fed the violence or
to put in place sufficient processes to help to resolve grievances and grief after
years of atrocities made that inevitable. It was
nothing new that one of them might be a suspect in a criminal investigation. A
suggestion that the paramilitary organisation, the IRA, was back in existence
was however entirely new and a grave threat to the peace. It was surprising
that the PSI Chief Constable backed up his Officer. His careful statement was never
going to be fully reported after the first instance. He should have been less equivocal.
Again, it appears he was not as fully conscious of the political dangers as
former incumbents of the post might have been.
Micheal Martin rushed
to compound that failure to duly regard politics with his expedient use of a shorthand
sound-bite. It was political opportunism at its worst. There was no need to repeat
the inaccuracy. He could have added critical clarification. But it served to
score a point against a Sinn Fein he now has to compete against for votes in
the election next year. I have been impressed by his leadership of a party
struggling to make a comeback. His success so far has been impressive but last
week I knew nothing had changed. The old politics are still in place.
Expediency rules.
In Ireland and
many States, the call from all sides for a renewal of political structures to
rebuild the trust that polls and low turnouts on polling day suggest has been
badly eroded is pointless if the attitudes at the heart of the problem prevail.
One could even argue that if the attitudes changed (and research shows that it
is attitudes that are foremost in deciding behaviour and change) the need for structural
change would be significantly reduced.
I hate Joan
Burton’s statement that the Taoiseach has been ‘cleared of wrongdoing’ by the
Fennelly Report. It may have been the required political sound-bite but it
stinks of expediency. It avoids all mention of the fine line he was traversing.
We will never know the ins and outs of the responsibility the Garda Commisioner in the Republic, who retired early last year, has for what was going on in a
culture that increasinglyseems to be the norm throughout the organs of
the State. It could be argued that with all the emerging controversies arising
from his time in office he ought to retire early. But we do not have a culture
of people resigning when the perception of things happening under their watch
turn sour. Wasn’t that what politicians used to do? Doesn’t that make the Garda Commissioner a scapegoat? The Taoiseach can no longer have trusted the Minister
for Justice or he wouldn’t have gone over his head, but it was the Commissioner he felt should be informed that he might no longer be able to tell
his Cabinet he could put his trust in. If he hadn’t been put in such an
untenable position, the Garda Chief could have retired anyway – in protest at
the behaviour of the political establishment. Maybe that is what has happened.
I watched with
initial horror the bullying tactics and expletives, totally unacceptable in any
other workplace, deployed to train the Irish Army recruits on RTE television’s
documentary (11th & 12th Sept, 2015). I refused to allow myself give in to an urgent desire to change
channels. Some of the recruits laughed in the first instance. It was so
ridiculous it was laughable. I smiled myself, remembering going to a Secretarial
College and wanting to laugh when the teacher called on ‘Miss Harris and Miss …’
to ‘stand up’ for speaking to each other in class. Even in the 1970s, (I was
brought up in rather privileged circumstances, given I was sent to a liberal
school)I hadn’t seen anyone being asked to ‘Stand up’ for misbehaviour since First
Class in National School. But the Sergeant was serious and she made it very
clear by further expletives and demands backed up by the Lieutenant and other
Officers.
The would-be
soldiers were given the justification that discipline is essential. It became
clear that attention to detail – taught through attending to details of uniform
and dress, no button could be out of place – and the developing of an inbuilt automatic
response to follow an order could save their life, or that a fellow soldier,
within a couple of years. The runner up
for best recruit of the year was an exceptional woman recruit who may have been pipped at the
post because she answered back under the extreme conditions, and for the first
time in seventeen weeks, on a week-long training exercise out in the mountains.
It doesn’t augur well for overcoming groupthink in the Army. I presume they’d
argue first things first: there isn’t time when lives are at risk to have
soldiers questioning orders.
If the attention
to detail required by our soldiers was required in politics, or in other parts
of the civil service and in civilian life in general, we might be living in a
very different country and not find ourselves in the straits we’re in. However
groupthink and the kind of discipline that doesn’t allow questions or critical
thinking is antithetical to what is required for creative and just solutions to
problems.
One has to ask if
it’s still appropriate in the times we live in to train soldiers with bullying
and expletives. I find it hard to believe we can’t do a whole lot better. Nevertheless,
if I were a soldier looking at the shenanigans of the political leaders in
whose hands their lives are ultimately held I’d be concerned. Without soldiers
and Gardai the State has no power and can’t uphold any values. If we are going
to teach our armed forces to be disciplined we had better all be disciplined in
taking care of the values and peace we are asking them to help us to uphold. Nightly we see the refugees fleeing the breakdown
of politics and the chaos of war. On an international scale, it has never been
clearer that we need to build and take care of the peace. Politics is critical
in that care. We don’t need a new politics we need a renewal in politics. We
need our leaders to take leadership in demonstrating the values in their own
behaviour that we want to ask our soldiers to risk their lives to uphold for
the Nation.
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