State bullies weak yet it panders to the powerful

I SOMETIMES wonder whether we are so passive about the way the Government behaves because we find some of that behaviour literally incredible.

The levels of hypocrisy or incompetence or injustice are so great that the mind cannot quite accept them as reality. They seep into that part of the brain we reserve for outlandish fictions and tall tales.

Instead of getting up to shake our fists, as we might do if we could accept that the story is true, we look on in open-mouthed wonder. We treat the scandal as a spectacle, and thus behave as spectators.

Take for instance, the ways in which the Government has dealt with the idea of compensation in the last fortnight.

To even begin to compare and contrast the treatment by the Government of women who were incarcerated in Magdalen homes on the one side and of the former director general of Fás, Rody Molloy, on the other, is to enter the territory of crude satiric exaggeration. As a story, it is entirely lacking in credibility, except for the minor detail that it is in fact true.

We know the State played a key role in the maintenance of the extraordinary system of Magdalen institutions in which Irish women were incarcerated and enslaved for the crimes of being in “moral danger”.

Many of the women were sent to the homes by the courts. The women slaved in laundries that were often fulfilling State contracts, for the Army or hospitals. The State also failed completely to protect the civil and human rights of these women.

For anyone with a basic sense of justice, it is obvious that the State should compensate the surviving Magdalen women for their appalling treatment. Yet they were excluded from the workings of the Residential Institutions Redress Board.

And earlier this month, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe wrote to Tom Kitt TD to say that the Government has no intention of taking any responsibility whatsoever for the treatment of the women and would not do anything to compensate them.

He also deliberately referred to the women as “employees” – a phrase which hints at what will happen if the women take action in the courts. The State will fight them all the way, even to the extent of denying that they were in fact subjected to forced and unpaid labour.

So the message to the surviving Magdalens, almost all of whom are elderly and many of whom are vulnerable and impoverished, is: see you in court.

The State will quite happily spend whatever money it takes to fight the Magdalens all the way to the Supreme Court and beyond.

And it will almost certainly threaten them as it threatened Louise O’Keeffe when she sued the State for the sexual abuse she suffered at national school in the 1970s.

O’Keeffe was warned that the State would pursue her for the entire cost of her case – up to €1 million.

The cruelty of the hard line taken against O’Keeffe and the Magdalens is unspeakable, but it has some logic.

The message it sends out is that the State will use all its considerable resources to intimidate anyone who comes looking for compensation and will relentlessly pursue those who take the risk of suing it in the courts.

Then along comes Molloy and the State is transmogrified from Clint Eastwood to Lady Bountiful. If ever there was a case for saying “so sue me”, it was Molloy’s. He presided over a period in which Fás executives used public money with exuberant indifference and in the process devalued the whole idea of public service.

Molloy should have been sacked and should have counted himself fortunate to be able to leave with his already generous entitlements intact.

Instead, he was rewarded with a pension worth €111,000 a year, a tax-free lump sum of €333,732, and a taxable ex-gratia payment of €111,243.

We were initially told that the decision to top up his pension package to €1 million was taken because he had threatened legal action. But, as the Taoiseach confirmed yesterday, this was not so. Molloy did not even have to threaten legal action to get his way. The State gave him a large wodge of public money just on the off-chance that he might sue.

As compensation for having to retire a few years early because he had failed to do his job properly, Molloy got a million euro. As compensation for being kidnapped and enslaved, the Magdalen women will get nothing.

Can the Government that squares up to the Magdalens, denies their suffering by calling them “employees” and effectively announces its willingness to see them in court, be the same timid creature that was so terrified of Molloy?

The answer of course is that it is not the same. There are two Governments, two States. There is one, stern-faced and implacable, for those to whom harm is done. And there is another, gentle and accommodating, for those who are powerful enough to do harm.

We don’t actually believe this, of course. It is far too outrageous to be true.