Public life has been paralysed by the refusal to acknowledge that wrongdoing has taken place. The defence of ‘I have broken no law’ is simply not good enough
EARL DEVANEY has only been to Ireland once. He was a special agent in the US secret service when an American president visited us, but he can’t remember which one. Devaney specialised in white-collar crime and later headed the secret service fraud division.
He became inspector general for the US department of the interior (DOI) in 1999. He is the chief official responsible for investigating fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement within this department.
The DOI manages one-fifth of the land in the US, has responsibility for the provision of water to 31 million people, and administers energy projects that provide 30 per cent of the nation’s energy production. The DOI has 73,000 employees, about the size of a good American city, as Devaney described it when I spoke to him recently the morning after the Super Bowl.
Devaney delivered three extraordinary reports to the US Congress last September in which he accused senior DOI officials of regulatory incompetence and fostering a “culture of managerial irresponsibility and lack of accountability”.
These ethical failures tolerated conflicts of interest, cronyism and other lapses such as engaging in drugs and sex with oil-company employees. The New York Times noted at the time that “the people it [the White House] brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune”.
Indeed, in his 2006 house subcommittee hearing testimony, Devaney was refreshingly forthright in his description of such behaviour: “Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”
Ireland has lessons to learn from the Devaney experience. Who regulates the regulators? When is ethical impropriety defined as criminality?
Following the US Senate affairs committee investigation, James Steven Griles, the former DOI deputy secretary, was sentenced to 10 months in prison in 2007. Griles was found to have obstructed the Senate’s investigation into corruption allegations surrounding former Washington lobbyist Jack A Abramoff.
The prosecutor, Armando Bonilla, told the judge that Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to be jailed in the Abramoff scandal, had “abused his position of trust”. Devaney believes this was a turning point in restoring American confidence in his department.
“The public’s perception was lost and I don’t think there is really anything that can happen except you try to put in place the things that will allow the public to see, over a period of time, that the ship has been straightened out again. There is no shortcut on this. I think it’s going to take several years before people forget the things that happened here and we have their confidence restored. It’s not impossible but it’s not done overnight.”
Devaney believes that, once lost, trust “is very difficult to get back” and its restoration takes time. “Unfortunately, people tend to draw the line where criminality begins and put their toes right up on the line, and that’s what we saw in the last eight years. They were dangerously close to committing criminal behaviour as defined by our laws and it seemed that they just wanted to stand an inch on the other side of the line . . . Even the perception, never mind the reality, of corruption is going to be very detrimental to an organisation.”
How many people in Ireland have been convicted of white-collar crime?
The first convictions for bribery in Ireland occurred in the early 1940s. A Department of Education civil servant and his step-brother, a former county councillor, were jailed for bribing councillors to vote for individual Seanad election candidates.
Taoiseach Éamon de Valera responded by initiating the Seanad Electoral (Panel Members) Act, 1947. This Act fundamentally reorganised the method of election to the Seanad and today forms the basis for elections to the Upper House.
De Valera’s Fianna Fáil government responded to ethical wrongdoing with radical reform. Those found guilty of impropriety were jailed. The past is not another country, it has just been forgotten.
Now, more than ever, we must challenge the mindset that inhibits reflection and assessment of why wrongdoing has occurred in the first place. Public life has been paralysed by this refusal to acknowledge as much publicly. A society can only learn from its mistakes when it acknowledges that mistakes have been made. The defence of “I have broken no law, therefore I have done no wrong” is simply not good enough anymore.
In the context of a Dáil debate on the recapitalisation of the banks last Thursday, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley said: “In the United States you see people who are white-collar criminals led out in handcuffs. I want to see the same regime in this country, and I believe we will get the same regime in this country.”
Such comments can only be welcomed. Gormley’s suggestion, however, that the Government needs to go beyond Irish shores for a regulator of international repute assumes that somehow other countries have regulators to spare in today’s global financial crisis.
We can do our own dirty work and we should have done it four tribunals ago.