Stephen Collins: The virtual silence on Shatter's hounding from office is odd

In an age when injustices perpetrated in the past are regarded as important current news, there is something decidedly odd about the virtual silence that continues to surround the hounding from office just five years ago of Alan Shatter, one of the best ministers for justice in the history of the State.

Almost all of the claims and allegations that ultimately forced Shatter's resignation from office in 2014 have been discredited or shown to be entirely false by judicial inquiries and decisions handed down by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.

Yet the bulk of the media which whipped up a frenzy about Shatter on a range of issues in the first half of 2014 barely reported the most recent twist in the saga in February when the Supreme Court found the former minister’s constitutional right to his good name and reputation had been damaged and that he had not been accorded fair treatment.

This Supreme Court decision followed a similar one by the Court of Appeal in November 2016. Earlier that year, the O'Higgins Commission found there was no basis for the serious allegations against Shatter made by Sgt Maurice McCabe.

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The response to Shatter's vindication has been virtual silence from the media and the Opposition politicians who denounced him for things he never did. His former colleagues in Fine Gael who abandoned him when the going got tough have shown a similar desire to draw a veil over the whole affair.

Former colleagues who abandoned him when the going got tough have shown a desire to draw a veil over the affair

Naturally Shatter, who was forced to resign from the Cabinet in May 2014 and who lost his Dáil seat in February 2016, is not ready to forget about the whole thing just yet. He has written a book Frenzy and Betrayal to give his side of the story and it deserves careful reading by anyone interested in how truth so often becomes the first casualty in political debate.

It should be required reading for journalists, politicians, civil servants and lawyers as a case study of how false narratives can develop with lightening speed and become widely accepted as fact with devastating consequences for those caught in the centre .

Guerin’s report

The book details from Shatter’s perspective the unfolding of a series of events ranging from the claims made by McCabe, the disclosure of penalty points cancellations, the alleged bugging of the Gsoc headquarters, the intervention of the Data Protection Commissioner and the appointment of barrister Sean Guerin to investigate McCabe’s allegations of Garda corruption.

It was Guerin's report into those allegations that ultimately cost Shatter his job when then taoiseach Enda Kenny told him that on the basis of it he could no longer express confidence in him as minister for justice. Extraordinarily, Guerin never interviewed Shatter for his damning report.

Shatter probably failed to get a fair hearing because the public generally has little sympathy for politicians and assumes, wrongly, that none of them tell the truth. In the political world, his combative style and formidable intellect didn’t endear him to many of his fellow Dáil deputies while large elements of the legal profession had it in for him because of his efforts to reform the system and reduce the costs of litigation for citizens.

Shatter failed to get a fair hearing because the public has little sympathy for politicians and assumes none tell the truth

The only person in the Dáil to offer a defence of Shatter when he was being abused from all corners after his resignation was Clare Labour TD and barrister Michael McNamara who wrote: “His lack of deference to his ‘learned friends’ attracted a level of resentment unparalleled since Roger Casement was denied legal representation by the Bar of Ireland. His resignation was greeted with glee in the Law Library with some of Ireland’s finest legal minds punching the air in frenzied scenes of jubilation.” Maybe Shatter should be grateful he wasn’t hanged like Casement.

Frenzied reporting

Shatter certainly compounded his problems by making some ill-judged interventions when the pressure was most intense. However, it is important to reflect on his fate because what happened to him could easily befall any minister and in fact did happen to his successor Frances Fitzgerald just three years later. In this time of unstable minority governments, the same process of unsubstantiated allegations, frenzied reporting and wild accusations on social media could lead to the fall of governments and facilitate the rise of demagogues.

It can be hard for journalists competing for scoops to stand back and come to dispassionate judgments at the height of any political storm. When the media’s insatiable appetite for controversy is fused with the natural tendency of opposition politicians to paint the actions of any embattled minister in the most unfavourable light a lethal cocktail is quickly brewed.

The more intense the controversy is and the longer it goes on, the more dangerous a minister’s position becomes as colleagues distance themselves to save their own skins.

The Victorian British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once wrote: “There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.”

Shatter’s fate confirms that that some things never change.