Families of children with scoliosis were desperately hurt this week and they want a tribunal of enquiry.
They must get full access to the truth and to justice.
But I’ll be honest — if it were me, I’d feel honour bound to tell them that a tribunal of enquiry will only compound their trauma.
It will not get to anything like the truth — not within five years anyway.
Mother and baby home survivors were told this week that the religious orders who profited from them feel no sense of responsibility for them. Their wealth and assets matter more. A brilliant woman called Sheila Nunan took on the orders on behalf of survivors. The orders told her, and the rest of us, to get stuffed.
We’re a great country, do you know that? In all sorts of ways. Not just great but clever too. Sometimes I’m really proud of those characteristics. Other times, I’m more than a bit ashamed of them. When I’m ashamed of something we’ve done, I tend to want to do something about it. It usually starts with owning up. And in this case, there’s a lot of owning up to be done.
We’re a great country because we believe in justice. We’re a clever country because we have a dozen different ways of making sure it never happens.
We’re a great country because of our total commitment to openness, transparency, full disclosure — all those things that are key to democratic underpinnings, that help to ensure justice. But we’re a clever country because we know exactly how to ensure that none of those things ever really disturb us.
Ireland is set up to deny the things it boasts about to individuals and families who have been wronged. It is set up to ensure that the powerful are always ultimately protected. It is set up to deny truth.
When something goes terribly wrong in the public sphere in Ireland, there are essentially four ways to get at the truth and to establish some measure of justice. There’s the legal system, public tribunals of enquiry, and the less adversarial and supposedly quicker commissions of investigation.
And then there are enquiries conducted by people of goodwill at the behest of the State. Look at each of them in turn.
Let’s say something unthinkable happens in a hospital, and your child suffers a catastrophic incident at birth. You are desperate to know what happened, and to establish how your child can be cared for into the future. You ask the hospital or some other public body, and you will be guaranteed a default response. Written by a lawyer.
So you sue, because you have no alternative. You might, often will, get there in the end. There will be an apology in all probability, and a financial settlement. But it will take 15 to 18 years of your child’s life. Everything you have – your house, your income - will be at risk for every day of that. You will be under the sort of pressure that will take years to get over.
And what you won’t know is that the hospital had a pretty clear idea of what went wrong and why, virtually from the beginning. Whenever there’s a major incident a detailed file is opened. And most of the truth is in there.
So there’s never been a good reason for them to deny you’re telling the truth. But they will stonewall and prevaricate, putting your family through a wringer, for years. Just because.
Imagine if instead a hospital sat down with a family and said: “There’s been a terrible incident and it has damaged your child. We don’t know exactly how it happened, although we are determined to find out. But we know it wasn’t your fault, it was ours. We owe you a profound apology and we want to work with you to make sure your child is properly cared for into the future.”
Imagine the pain that sort of conversation could prevent. But it can’t happen. We’re not set up that way.
Or imagine it’s an even bigger public policy disaster, of the sort that has affected an entire generation or caused immense public harm. That needs probably a public tribunal of enquiry.
In my political lifetime we’ve had between 10 and 15 of them. All told, they have cost more than a thousand million euro and enabled some members of the legal profession to support the lifestyles to which they are no doubt entitled.
Some of them (Kerry Babies) were unmitigated travesties; some shed light; some led to at least promises of reform, some did a bit of damage to the reputations of scoundrels.
Not a single one of them resulted in a criminal conviction (other than the odd brave journalist who was threatened for protecting sources). Not a single one provided closure to people who had been damaged. Not a single one led to guilty parties offering significant redress.
And then you have the system of commissions of investigation, supposed to be a more effective way of getting at the truth without the damage caused by an adversarial system. Mother of heavens.
There is one still outstanding, which has been going on now for seven years and has yet to make a significant finding of fact, despite its (so far) €8m cost.
Families I have worked with have appeared in front of these enquiries, told the truth faithfully, and have been broken and traumatised by the experience. Whistle-blowers have seen their lives destroyed.
The only other way in which we have tried to get at the truth of some terrible situations in Ireland has been to simply ask decent and reputable people to find out what happened and to report to the State.
I can think of three incidences immediately and I’m sure there are more. Kelly Fitzgerald was a little girl who died at the hands of abusive parents while the State messed around.
Six young people in a Roscommon family suffered life-changing abuse while the State felt its hands were tied (by a weird interpretation of the Constitution).
Joe McColgan was a farmer who brutally abused his children, physically and sexually, while the local authorities felt themselves bound by an ethos of “keeping families together”.
Enquiries into those three stories, all very particular and individual stories, were conducted by independent people whose public service was boundless. From direct knowledge, I can attest that two of them were bullied and harassed throughout by the public servants they were investigating (I never knew the third person).
It demonstrates that it takes courage and determination to take on the powers that be. All three reports told the truth. Nobody ever thanked the truth-tellers.
We need to ask a Citizens’ Assembly to examine all this and to propose a new way, which will undoubtedly involve constitutional change, to really enable truth to emerge, closure to be achieved, and justice to be done. That has worked in the past and could again.
Let’s start by naming it. We’re a great country that talks endlessly about truth and transparency.
But we’re far too clever to ever really make it happen.