"Secrecy," Cardinal Richelieu maintained, "is the first essential in affairs of the state." Our latter-day Richelieus in Government Buildings would undoubtedly concur, writes Patrick Smyth
Not so Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the venerable former Senator for New York, who died last Thursday. No radical or liberal he - his name is more likely to be associated with a neo-conservatism whose ideological underpinnings this hawkish Democratic intellectual began to lay decades ago. But Moynihan was also a formidable critic of government secrecy whose pernicious influence, he believed, would lead the US down massive blind alleys that would cost it billions and jeopardise world peace.
In the debate on the Freedom of Information Act in Ireland it is almost taken for granted by all sides that secrecy is proper to the world of security and diplomacy. But the truth is, as Moynihan argued in his classic work Secrecy (1998), wherever secrecy pervades it perverts decision-making by providing a cover for incompetence if not corruption. Ideas are not tested in free debate. Tthe worst of bureaucracy flourishes unhindered. Democracy and accountability are thwarted - Richelieu's clear intent. The control of information is power.
Within the beast itself, inter-institutional secrecy fuels debilitating internal power struggles - one agency against another (the failure of the FBI/CIA liaison most recently left the US completely unprepared for 9/11). Or worse still, one agency against the elected President. Moynihan recalls the decision of the chairman of the joint chiefs to withhold from President Truman one of the most sensational US intelligence coups, the cracking of codes used to send messages from the Russian embassy to Moscow, the so-called Venona transcriptions, which revealed a number of key Soviet agents. Although Truman was not told, ironically Moscow was - by Kim Philby.
Moynihan's specific target - one of his major political preoccupations - was the extraordinary overestimation by US intelligence of the paper tiger that the Soviet Union had become in the decade before it disintegrated. Successive US administrations insisted that the Soviet Union presented a real and massive military threat - particularly an imagined missile superiority - when in reality it was barely able to maintain an apparatus for internal security, let alone foreign adventures, and its economy was crumbling.
The policy led to the massive diversion of resources into needless arms spending and saw the prolongation of a Cold War mentality and rhetoric, based on a colossal fiction whose credibility was never tested because its rationalisation was shrouded in secrecy. And yet, as Moynihan, no friend of communism, points out, a simple tourist visit to Moscow was enough to suggest the image of invincibility was deeply suspect. Moynihan's far-reaching critique of secrecy springs from a feature of the US political system which is not shared by our own - the sometimes vigorous and frustrating, but above all, healthy tension that exists between the White House and Capitol Hill, the executive and the legislature. Congressional oversight committees have the sort of teeth which our own Oireachtas committees only dream of. Or rather, should dream of.
What is most striking about the Freedom of Information debate is the complete absence of any pressure from Government backbenchers to safeguard one of the mechanisms that could allow them at least a chance of a genuine share in the discussion process. Contrast the fight they are willing to put up on the dual mandate, or even smoking in pubs, with the deafening silence and docility of Government supporters on the issue. Despite all the talk in recent years of Oireachtas reform and the empowerment of backbenchers, they have acquiesced in their own neutering. It would not happen on the Hill.
The Government's crucial amendments to the legislation are designed precisely to copperfasten the exclusion of all but the immediate ministerial circle from the debate on decisions until after they have been made.
Yet Moynihan's case against Richelieu is that such procedures inevitably bring with them the prospect of systemic failures, sometimes monumental, even on the most sensitive of subjects, and remove the opportunity for correction which public debate allows .
All political systems have a need for some secrecy, but the logic of good and efficient decision-making must be to create a system in which the rule is openness and transparency, secrecy, the exception. We are heading in the opposite direction. Yet Moynihan was not a journalist after scoops, nor a crazed ultra-democrat set on undermining the presidency. He was a quintessentially conservative member of the establishment who wanted the system to work. He believed secrecy is a poison in that system, openness, a life-giving oxygen.