Culture of secrecy makes a mockery of democracy

HOW many disasters does it take to make a crisis? In the absurd arithmetic of Irish politics, the answer is "none". There is, apparently, no number of gross betrayals of public trust that can add up to a sum total of radical reform. There is no limit to the amount of ineptitude that will be let pass before our political leaders face the fact that Irish democracy is in a state.

In less than three years, we have had staggering failures to protect the public interest by the Blood Transfusion Service Board, the Department of Health, the Department of Agriculture and Food, the Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice.

People have died, tens of millions of pounds have been lost to the public purse and the most basic mechanisms of law and order have been subjected to justified ridicule. What has to happen before the need to reform our democracy becomes obvious, even to the Government?

It is not as if this Government doesn't know what's wrong. It knows that at the heart of the problem is a culture of secrecy and cover up, of treating public information as a private asset, to be guarded, manipulated and employed more frequently for purposes of intimidation than of enlightenment.

It knows that so long as that culture thrives, so too will incompetence. It knows that ineptitude and secrecy are bosom buddies. And yet, it has told us, in so many words, that the crowning glory of that culture of secrecy - absolute Cabinet confidentiality - is to remain in place.

In his famous speech before the 1992 general election, Dick Spring made it clear that open government could not be reconciled with absolute Cabinet confidentiality. "This is the Taoiseach," he said of Albert Reynolds, "who promised open government but whose Government fought in the Supreme Court to establish a system of Cabinet secrecy that flies in the face of that promise."

This is the Tanaiste, one might now say, who promises open government but who waits until the Government has its back to the wall before hinting, as he did on Wednesday night, that he does not agree with John Bruton's intention to put the promised referendum on Cabinet confidentiality on the shelf.

The worst thing about the system of Cabinet confidentiality that Dick Spring so rightly denounced is not that it sanctions secrecy, but that it sanctions hypocrisy. It makes a joke of legality, of democracy, and of the Constitution. For, on the one hand, we are told it is an absolute imperative of Government and, on the other, it is flouted regularly and with impunity.

ACCORDING to the majority ruling of the Supreme Court, as given by the then Chief Justice Finlay, the Attorney General "must have the clearest possible duty to intervene on his own behalf, as Attorney General, to protect" the right to absolute Cabinet confidentiality.

In the words of Mr Justice O'Flaherty, the Attorney General is obliged "as the custodian of constitutional rights and privileges" to prevent any breach of Cabinet confidentiality. This is a matter not of choice but duty: "It is one of his duties to step in a situation such as this."

Why then did the Attorney General not intervene to prevent the former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds from revealing details of Cabinet discussions in his libel case in the High Court in London? At one point, in his evidence, Mr Reynolds, asked whether he told his Cabinet colleagues in 1988 that his officials had strongly advised him against giving more export credit cover for beef going to Iraq, suggested that he "would have told them at the Cabinet meeting anyway".

This, ironically, was the precise Cabinet meeting at issue in the Cabinet confidentiality case taken by Mr Reynolds's Attorney General, Mr Harry Whelehan. According to the ruling of the Supreme Court, any revelation of the nature or content of Cabinet discussions is unconstitutional.

Later on in his evidence, Mr Reynolds was asked about the Masri passport affair. He told the court that it been discussed at Cabinet: "The only time I recall it being raised at the Cabinet meeting was when the Minister for Justice said to the Cabinet that she was going to review the scheme. At that stage, at that meeting, I said I think that the better deal could be got on soft loans because the Masri family had invested £1.1 million at whatever rate ... and I believe now, at the lower rate, that a better deal could be got."

From this evidence, we know what the Minister for Justice and the Taoiseach said at a meeting of the Cabinet - precisely the kind of information that is supposed to be excluded from the public domain.

Now it would, of course, have been absurd for the Government or the Attorney General to have sought an injunction to prevent Mr Reynolds from travelling to London, though such an action might, considering the X Case, have a certain poignancy. It would have been absurd if newspaper reports on, and the transcripts of Mr Reynolds's evidence, had been seized as forbidden documents.

And it would have been grossly unfair to Mr Reynolds if he had been prevented from answering questions in a libel action because of a constitutional prohibition. But those absurdities are precisely the point. A law which cannot be enforced without making the courts, the Attorney General and the Government into fit subjects for ridicule is an absurd law.

NOTE, too, that Irish civilisation as we know it has not collapsed since October 22nd, when Albert Reynolds gave this evidence in London. According to John Bruton last month, it would be "a major change in constitutional practices maintained in this country for a long time" if Cabinet secrecy were relaxed. Yet this major change has actually happened.

Details of Cabinet discussions have been revealed. And not only did the revelation have no effect whatsoever on the great institutions of State, but nobody even noticed.

All of this is more, however, than harmless nonsense. The gap between what political leaders say and what they do is the hole in which Irish democracy is stuck. And what has happened in relation to Cabinet secrecy both exemplifies and sanctions the kind of behaviour that has brought public office in Ireland into contempt. Behaviour like announcing certain principles when you're in opposition and ignoring them when you're in Government.

Like making commitments in your Programme for Government and then declaring that it would be inconvenient to fulfil them. Like getting the highest court in the land to enunciate certain fundamental principles and then treating those principles as optional extras.

Like adopting radical reforms that have been obviously necessary for many years only when expediency so demands. So long as that kind of behaviour is seen as one of the perks of office, it will be hard for the public to muster much sympathy for any Minister who falls foul of a system in which public business is nobody's business.