I was writing about the Department of Justice yesterday actually, it's quite amazing that I don't write all out it every day. It was, I believe, Marshall Foch who said that military justice is to justice what military music is to music. He was, of course, speaking about France, not Ireland. In Ireland, the Department of Justice is to justice what an employment exchange is to employment.
Why is this? Why is the Department a byword among journalists for secretiveness and unhelpfulness? Why has the Department become synonymous with failure? Why does everybody presume that anything to do with the Department will never improve?
There is no area in Irish life which has failed to match the standards of European civilisation in the way that the administration of the law, prisons and the courts system has. When we joined the EEC 23 years ago, we thought ourselves backward and we were. Our roads and telecommunications were primitive our concepts of civil and sexual liberties were defined by the celibate old bachelors of the Catholic Hierarchy the rights of the citizen as citizen remained beyond conversation or debate. Governments existed to possess and exercise authority, regardless of other considerations. When Jack Lynch wanted to sack the RTE Authority, he did so with an ease and with a lack of outcry which astonished the British Prime Minister, Ted Heath.
Much has changed since then but the culture of arrogant incompetence which was to be found throughout Irish life and which has vanished from most areas, or at least receded, remains as powerfully present in the administration of law, of prisons, of courts, of policing, as ever.
Decaying Hulk
Reports on the state of the administration of law in Ireland could sink an aircraft carrier. Yet another, on our courts system, was presented some days ago by Mrs Justice Susan Denham and it is no attempt at ingratiation to record here the regret that other judges are not like her. But they are not. And there's an end of it. And, even if they were like her, I suspect that not very much would change in that vast antiquated old barque, the legal system, part paddle steamer, part tea clipper, part tramp steamer and all of it a great decaying hulk staining the waters with rust and old oil.
Why? Largely because the Irish people either want it so or are prepared to tolerate this state of affairs. Were working class Catholics to commit suicide in Northern jails at the rate they commit suicide in jails in the Republic the latest, a 20 year old woman who hanged herself in her cell Dublin would be in uproar. Mountjoy jail is now suicide city, and the people to blame are not the over worked, over stressed prison staff, who have one of the most unenviable professions in the land, but us. Nobody else.
If we wanted a civilised prison system, we would by this time have managed to build one. But we did not. It was significant that the major protest against the failure to build the new prison at Castlerea the initial work towards which cost us a tidy little £5 million was not about the abominable conditions in Mountjoy, but instead about the lost employment opportunities in the Castlerea area.
Nothing illustrates the statist culture which infects so much of our political discourse than this that a State institution is seen primarily as a means of creating employment rather than discharging its designated duties. A hospital does not treat the sick, but gives jobs a prison does not house prisoners, but spreads prosperity through the area in which it is sited. So is it any wonder that, with the institutions of the State so subverted by false goals, they do not work?
Shameful Failure
But that is not the only reason why the administration of law is so slovenly. It is, essentially, slovenly because we want it to be 50. And nothing proves this more than the shameful failure of this State to conform with our moral and legal requirements to extradite terrorist suspects for trial in another jurisdiction.
In the most recent case, we hear that a Garda sergeants shredded the wrong document from now on, we are told, the British will send their extradition warrants on coloured paper, so that they don't get shredded.
But it is not a question of this document being shredded or that document being shredded. If we were really serious about attending to our duties as a civilised State, a single document failure would not be adjudged to be a warrant for the accused person to walk free for all time, regardless of the evidence in the case, without ever getting close to a sniff of a trial.
The previous case for extradition was over the cold blooded murder of a British army recruiting sergeant in Derby. Extradition warrants against two Northern Ireland men were, thrown out for three reasons I, that the procedures in the initial court hearings were improperly attended to 2, that the deed was political 3, that British media coverage meant there was a serious risk those accused would not get a fair trial.
The judge was no doubt applying the law and it is quite shameful that, as the law stands, extradition and a trial, and the administration of justice, can be prevented on such grounds. After a quarter of a century of mayhem and bloodshed, we still seem incapable of attending to our duties, which involve justice being done, and being seen to be done.
Loophole Culture
It most certainly was not done in the case of the murdered staff sergeant, Michael Newman, shot in the head from behind as he left his office. That there should be arrests in connection with this vile deed, but no trial, cries to heaven for justice but not, apparently, to Dail Eireann, which has allowed the loophole culture to turn the rule of law into a farce in anything to do with terrorism. For example, because Sgt Newman was murdered with a revolver rather than a machine gun, the deed qualified as "political".
Should loyalists shoot Dublin politicians, taking care to use revolvers, I trust our legislators will remember how "political" those deeds are.