The Message: See no evil, hear no evil

Another fortnight, another slew of crises. The hope is that sanity will prevail and war will be avoided in Ukraine, though the reverberations from that increasingly dangerous melting pot may yet plunge us all into a nightmare scenario.

By sending troops into Crimea, Russia has invaded a sovereign, independent State. The reaction of the international community has been swift, but it is hard to see how either side can back down without significant loss of face. And, as we go to press, there is nothing in the demeanour of Vladimir Putin to suggest that he has any intention of responding positively to western appeals.

The break-up of the USSR has never really been accepted in Moscow. There are many in the political establishment there who regard the borders that separate the motherland of Russia from the surrounding states, including Ukraine, as an irritant that should be eliminated at the first opportunity.

The loss of Crimea to Ukraine was one of the outcomes of the collapse of the Soviet Union that most rankled. Almost 60% of the population there are ethnic Russians. And besides, the Russian Black Sea fleet is stationed in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. In truth, it can hardly be argued that Russia does not have a legitimate stake in the security of the region. If the boot were on a US foot, then Barack Obama would almost certainly move in a similar way to protect US interests. But that does not make the invasion and the threat of a wider war in the region any less urgent. We are on a knife edge...

Meanwhile, Putin has successfully used a poisonous brand of Russian conservatism to strengthen his hold on the region. The ban on ‘gay propaganda’ – passed into law in 2013 – was framed to give weight to Putin’s concept of the Good Russian, which has apparently been embraced by a huge majority of Russians. By western standards, the “good Russian” is a thoroughly unpleasant character indeed.

Russia, it has become ever clearer, is a crudely conservative country, dominated by the traditional tenets and values of the Russian Orthodox religion. Freedom of expression is a myth. As black footballers playing there have found out to their cost, racism is widespread. Homophobia is deeply embedded. Discrimination against gays is routine, as are physical attacks on them, apparently tacitly encouraged by the police. It is like Ireland in the 1950s in many ways, except far more vicious.

Putin deliberately contrived to play to this reactionary tendency to boost his popularity. And the bizarre thing is that the current anti-gay marriage lobby, here in Ireland, intentionally or otherwise, are effectively standing shoulder to shoulder with this creep. They should, as they say, consider their position...

Back in Ireland, the report into the deaths of four babies over a period of six years, from 2006 to 2012, in Portlaoise Hospital made grim reading. I won’t attempt to give a full account here of the medical misadventures which led to their deaths. What is clear is that in all four cases, it was either negligence or incompetence on the part of hospital management and staff which was the cause of death.

The response of the hospital to what happened was wrong on just about every level. In the first place, nothing was done to inform the parents of the circumstances that had led to the death of their children. No post-mortems were undertaken. Say nothing, the philosophy seemed to be, and no one will ever find out.

But the malaise ran even deeper than that. No effort was made to rectify the shortcomings which led to the death of Baby X in 2006 – and as a result another three babies died in similar, tragic circumstances.

Again, nothing would have come to light in relation to any of this, were it not for a Prime Time investigation on RTÉ – which uncovered the scarifying truth. The Chief Medical Officer in the Department of Health, Dr. Tony Holohan, was ordered to carry out an investigation by the Minister for Health, James Reilly. His report, published last week, was a damning indictment of the hospital management, as well as of the HSE, under whose aegis the hospital operates.

There was, of course, another thread: funding at the hospital had been cut. Three positions in the risk management function within the hospital became vacant, and none of them were filled. You could speculate that the deaths were a direct result of budgetary cuts. Meanwhile, however, the middle management staff, with which – almost everyone in Ireland agrees – the medical system here is weighed down, rumbled on as if their roles were more important than the life and death ones on the hospital floor.

Think about this again: without RTÉ’s intervention, no one would have said anything. It is, I suspect, a measure of one of the most glaring problems in contemporary Irish life. Rather than owning up to failure, the official mindset is to conceal it. It is a defensive position, which has led before – and is leading now in all sorts of different areas – to injustices on a grand scale...

The fortnight was notable also for the ructions in the Dáil concerning the treatment by the State, and its machinery, of Garda whistleblowers – and of the possibility that the Garda Ombudsman’s Office, GSOC, had been bugged, either officially or otherwise, by members of An Garda Síochána.

It is a complicated and hopelessly messy saga, which predates the current government in most respects. But it has been singularly unedifying nonetheless to watch the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, and his Government colleagues, attempt to dismiss it as a non-issue. The Minister has subsequently had to backtrack, step by step, finally agreeing to set up enquiries, which he had initially insisted were not necessary.

However you might view him as an individual, there is no doubt that Alan Shatter is a highly intelligent and capable performer. So how did he successfully cast himself as the demon in this circus, more interested in covering up what happened than in pursuing the truth?

To find the answer here – as in the Portlaoise Hospital scandal – we need to look at how the Irish public service works. Following the initial report in the Sunday Times, the answers Alan Shatter gave in the Dáil were undoubtedly based on briefings he received from senior officials in the Department and from senior Gardai. Almost certainly, his various speeches and statements on the issue were written by officials of the Department of Justice. And once again, they reflect the dominant ethos: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and, above all, admit no liability.

We have seen it repeatedly. Most people would instinctively recognise that the State could not reasonably deny responsibility for its failure to protect children who had been abused within the State Primary school system. The horrors inflicted on vulnerable kids screamed to high heaven for redress. And yet the State did deny responsibility, on the basis that the management of the schools was in the hands of private individuals or religious orders.

As a result, most victims of abuse at the hands of teachers were effectively bullied out of pursuing their right to damages, because of the fear that they might bankrupt themselves if they lost their cases. That is the way this story might have ended, had it not been for the immense courage of one woman.

Louise O’Keeffe, who was abused by the Principal of a school just outside Kinsale in Co. Cork, insisted on pursuing her action against the State to the bitter end. The High Court awarded her damages of €300,000 against the abuser, but insisted that the State was not liable – and awarded the State costs, believed to be €500,000, against her. That decision was upheld by the Supreme Court.

She took the case to Europe, with a plea based on the grounds of: the human rights obligations of the State, including the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment; the right to respect for private life; and the right to an effective remedy. Louise O’Keeffe’s legal team also said that the State had failed to provide a proper mechanism for parents to complain to authorities other than school management; and they alleged that it discriminated against Louise by trying to avoid responsibility for the abuse she had been subjected to, despite accepting responsibility to compensate children abused in residential institutions. The European court decided in her favour.

But why should Louise O’Keeffe have had to suffer through enormously stressful legal proceedings, and take huge financial risks, in order to have her human rights vindicated – all the moreso when those deciding to fight her, and to pursue her for costs, have a bottomless pit of State funding to fall back on?

Politicians generally get the blame for mean- spirited and wrong-headed decisions of this kind. The truth, however, is that they are, for the most part, simply taking the advice that is being given to them by their departments. And within the public service in Ireland there is a culture of saying as little as possible, admitting nothing, refusing to accept liability and generally obfuscating – and sometimes lying if necessary – in order to make it as hard as possible for citizens to obtain justice.

As we have seen here in Hot Press over the past year and a bit, the same instinct is in play, every step of the way, in relation to the mandatory fluoridation of our water. It doesn’t matter how deep or how high the evidence against the policy runs. Fluoridation is the status quo – and the mandarins will do anything and everything in their power to maintain it, in case the alternative might open the State up to legal action for failure to do what the public servants have been supposed to do from the outset, which is, to properly monitor the effects of fluoridation on Irish people.

Their failure; our cost. It is, as they say, the same old story. We will have to do something about it. We really will.