The Centre Circle

In its official statement, The Centre for Public Inquiry promises to report on the ethical conduct of public office holders and monitor the State’s human rights record. It will attempt to increase public awareness of the need for legislation to protect whistleblowers and will assist those who are victims of official maltreatment. Its all-Irish Board, which includes Damien Kiberd, broadcaster and former editor of the Sunday Business Post, will be chaired by Justice Feargus Flood of Planning Tribunal fame.

Investigative journalist Frank Connolly, whose writings about planning corruption ultimately lead to the jailing of former minister Ray Burke, has a notable track record in leftist activism, having been one of the main movers and shakers in the Carnsore rallies of the late seventies, and his more recent reports into allegations of Garda corruption contributed to the establishment of the Inquiry into their activities in Donegal.
But between the afore-mentioned and various other tribunals and inquiries, isn’t it a bit late now for this Centre for Public Inquiry?
“In many countries, such as Canada, there are watchdogs independent of the state who look at how citizens interact with the state and follow up complaints of official wrongdoing or maladministration, the abuse of taxpayers’ money and so on,” argues Connolly. “There’s a huge area of Irish life that requires constant independent scrutiny. But we won’t duplicate the work of tribunals or the Ombudsman, or the Comptroller and Auditor-General or Dail committees. In fact we hope to interact with them.”
The setting up of such an organisation could be seen as an indictment of the Gardai and the legal system, but Connolly argues that he has already received a substantial volume of complaints or allegations across a broad range of areas of Irish life, including planning and environmental issues where the citizens obviously don’t feel that existing channels can deal with them, and the relationship between corporate Ireland and the plain people of Ireland.
Funding for the Centre for Public Inquiry has been provided by Atlantic Philanthropies, the charitable foundation established by Irish-American businessman, Chuck Feeney, so while it won’t have any more rights than, say the RTE’s Prime Time investigation team or any other inquiring journalists, they will almost certainly have more resources than any private investigation agents in Ireland.
Connolly points out that they will have the financial resources to investigate matters that perhaps for time or reasons of commercial pressure, existing media cannot handle. They will not, for instance, become involved in family law issues but will concentrate on how state bodies, agencies, public officials operate and how they are answerable to the taxpayer and the citizen, as well as aspects of corporate culture, such as how financial institutions deal with their customers.
It might also be argued that there is enough corruption in the USA without the US-based Atlantic Philanthropies having to bother with us folks in Ireland. Connolly points out that they have funded The Centre For Public Integrity in Washington which has being doing for fifteen years the same kind of work they’ll fund in Ireland. “Their last major publication was Paying For The President, which looked at the funding for George Bush’s election campaign. So that whole interface between politics and business is a huge area and I’ve no doubt it’s one of the crucial areas we’ll be investigating too,” Connolly explains.
The multi-zillionaire Chuck Feeney is himself notoriously media-shy, so doesn’t Connolly find it a little incongruous that he might be paying people like Connolly to ask the kind of questions Feeney himself probably wouldn’t answer? Connolly believes that Feeney is a very private individual who doesn’t seek media attention and doesn’t give media interviews as he has a perfect right to.
“He’s given a sizeable fortune to a charitable foundation and, with his participation, they are handing it out at a fierce rate all over the world and that’s done to support ordinary people,” Connolly says.
Given the skulduggery in Irish politics, the financial sector, our legal system, the courts, the Gardai and the big corporations, Frank Connolly may have enough on his plate for the next few years and then some. If everything goes according to plan, it could be that Chuck Feeney's money will be well spent.

For further information on the Centre for Public Inquiry contact Frank Connolly 00 353 87 2515986 Email: [email protected]