POOR Nora Owen. She is merely the latest landlord of an ungovernable old slum which has been run by many different slum landlords over the years. Thus, this diseased tenement called the Department of Justice is roofless, its joists decaying, and rot rising from the foundations.
Every single party in the Dail has had a nibble in power; not one of them attempted to do anything about the most wretched, the most incompetent, the most complacent and the most arrogant department in Government. Fiasco has followed fiasco, yet still the department comported itself with the idiot arrogance of the Bourbons.
Throughout society, the areas of responsibility overseen by the Department of Justice combined ineffectuality with a disdainful refusal to reform; and the department was able to get away with this because in any other Government said "Enough". So nobody comes out of this mess very well; it is a national scandal so overpowering in its majesty that it is little wonder that paralysis seizes anybody who begins to contemplate it.
Monumental Folly
But let us be clear; it was not the department which caused use to have the monumental folly the Beef Tribunal, which absorbed so much of the time of the leading lawyers in the land, and such a Golconda of public money. There is something so intrinsically frivolous and shameful about the formation of the tribunal, which distributed such vast amounts of wealth to the already wealthiest group of people in Ireland, and even involved us paying thousands of pounds for a couple of nights in a hotel for Larry Goodman, and whose report could be then so ignored.
Worse still has been the unrepentant moral bankruptcy involved; none of the authors of this idiocy has publicly said they regret that so much money was squandered to little purpose. Why should they? It was not their money. And on balance, their lives will not be forfeit if murder once again becomes commonplace.
It certainly was not the fault of the Department of Justice alone that the law of Ireland says that if terrorists are prudently cool enough to murder with a revolver, they may not be extradited to the jurisdiction where the murder took place. That is the ruling of those fine fellows in the Supreme Court and only legislative changes could alter their judgment. No attempt was made, simply because we lack the political will to make the changes. My blood curdles with shame that this is so; yet who else feels so strongly about it? Who else feels that this law is an abomination?
And not just in this regard. When gardai raided what is believed to have been an IRA training camp and found a four wheel drive vehicle and a dinghy, clearly suggestive of an attack across Lough Foyle, because the apparent intention was not drugs related, the gardai were able to question the suspects for two days. The suspects might have been planning the murder of British soldiers or RUC men, but cross Border murder is only a Category Two Crime.
Yet had those men been involved in a plan to import marijuana, a weed I do not doubt some members of the Government in their heady 1960s youth might have passingly inhaled, they could have been interrogated for a week. Drugs, "because they touch upon the welfare of nice middle class kids in Dublin, are a matter of concern. Dead Border Protestants are a matter of less moment.
Moral Slum
The Department of Justice is not responsible for that moral slum which permits the would be murderer to walk free but the trafficker of drugs to be thrown into clink; that, by political omission as much as active commission, is the will of Dail Eireann. It has taken cumulative deed and cumulative inertia to create this grotesque legal situation; and cumulative deed and cumulative inertia have been required to permit the courts to develop the culture of arrogance which is now their prime characteristic.
Daily, the taxpayers who fund the folly of the newspapers with their incomprehensible cargo of reports, with admonitions from the judges that whoever dares to criticise what they have done will be hauled before those self same judges they have criticised, to be dispatched without trial to jail for contempt. They read, blinking in disbelief, that a man who was found guilty of repeatedly raping and buggering, a little girl gets six months; and dare say nothing because the wrath of judges is a wrath to be avoided at all costs.
No doubt if our legal system was a Mercedes Benz 600 SEL there would be a justification for this arrogance, but it is not; it is a 1971 Morris Marina, trailing rust, clouds of oil and deadly fumes of carbon monoxide, in a garage of clapped out old bangers dripping dolefully on to oil soaked soil. Within the garage is the ancient old steamthresher of law reform; the various arms of the Garda Siochana; the legal profession; the prison service; the offices of immigration and deportation; all of them in dire need of overhaul; and the actual department itself, from which weary journalists extract information with the ease of getting milk from a hen.
Dismal Panorama
One's eyes scan the dismal panorama of the recent past, and one cannot decide which farrago is the worst. Brinks Allied? (The biggest armed robbery in the history of the State which occurred after the Gardai had been informed it was going to occur). Lansdowne Road? (The destruction of the rugby stadium by rioting English fans of whose arrival the Gardai had been warned by the English police while Garda riot squads were deployed around television sets miles away).
The Kildare murder? (The failure of the investigating gardai to discover the weapon used to murder a woman; it was later found in a kitchen drawer). The planned murders of a dozen people in Dublin, and nobody charged? The explosion of heroin addiction, with a consequent crime wave touching every single area in the city?
The latest scandal to touch the department is just that; merely the latest, and certainly it will not be the last. It would be incredible anywhere else. In DoJ City, it is merely another tale to add to DoJ City's urban legends.