HEART BEAT:Evasion makes everyone more determined to get the truth, thinks MAURICE NELIGAN
WAKING ON the morning of the ground-breaking Irish Times/ Ipsos MRBI opinion poll, I rushed to the window. I half expected to see a bright red dawn over Dublin. I didn’t. It was murky grey as usual.
There are to be no easy sunny days here. Whoever takes over, and let that be as soon as possible, faces a hard road. Let’s have no false promises.
To understand our problems and fully appreciate them and any postulated solutions, we need to know the facts. We’re paying for all of this and we must know what is happening. Daniel “Pat” Moynihan, US Senator from New York and great friend of Ireland, wrote that, “Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.” This is a message that does not resonate with our present regime.
Banking files are withheld from official investigation under dubious claims of privilege. Freedom of Information legislation is emasculated, and information supplied often late and reluctantly, is commonly heavily redacted. Nama remains obscure to most of us and the information that is available to us, the owners, is shrouded in the mists of “commercial sensitivity”. The same applies throughout whole areas of supposedly public service.
I know that polls in isolation tell us little enough, but taken as a series tell us a lot. Now they tell us that this Government has lost its mandate, in no uncertain manner. The latest poll tells us that 82 per cent of the people have no confidence in the current government and leadership. The figures have been heading that way steadily for some time and we must remember that the present poll was compiled before the recent Regling/Watson and Honohan reports.
Technically, the Government has a mandate dating from 2007. That was in a different world, in a fairytale time, in a fable of their telling. The brutal world of 2010 with its appalling consequences of misgovernment is a very different place. The only mandate that Mr Cowen and his colleagues now possess is that dictated by the unedifying scramble for their own survival, whatever the cost to the rest of us.
We have now a major democratic deficit, and one need look no further than the refusal to hold the three pending byelections lest the results outline starkly what the polls portend.
Joseph Pulitzer, newspaper proprietor, journalist and founder of the eponymous prize, wrote concerning the role of the press in the maintenance of the democratic state: “There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice that does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press and sooner or later, public opinion will sweep them away.”
This is the duty of the free press in matters that fundamentally affect society. It is needed in Ireland today as never before, when the people and institutions are being treated with disdain.
Another sorry tale must be told. Late on the Friday evening before the long June weekend, the HSE finally told us that the number of children who died while in their care was 37 and that a total of 188 children, adolescents and young adults notified to them had also died. Most did not die of natural causes. Maybe I am unduly cynical but the timing of this announcement coupled with the fact that Dáil Éireann was to be a question-free environment for the following week, suggests strongly that the HSE would like these figures quietly brushed under the carpet.
In tandem with this the HSE, citing “legal reasons”, has refused to hand over files relating to those who died “in care” to those charged with investigating such deaths. It seems not to occur to them that this is counterproductive. Such evasion will make everybody more determined to reach the truth.
Despite the endeavours of many caring people, there are major problems in this area, and failings have been endemic for years. Let’s have a good hard look, free from dissembling and deceit, and see if things can be improved. Spare us the promises and let’s see some action. These children and young adults were failed, not only by the HSE, but by all of us in the wider society. They had nobody to turn to, nowhere else to go. They wound up in the charge of a service that was supposed to take care of them, but didn’t.