Does anyone remember OTA? It is not long ago since the buzz-words of Irish politics were Openness, Transparency and Accountability. They were used so often they acquired their own acronym. What GUBU was to the 1980s, OTA would be to the 1990s, writes Fintan O'Toole
After all the scandals, the muddle and manoeuvring, the spectacular collapse of the Reynolds government, things were going to be done differently.
It seems we were wrong about what OTA stands for. After the last week, I've been trying to crack the code. Omerta Tactics Apply? Oily, Tardy Answers? Only Technically Accurate? Outwit The Awkward? Only Talk Abstrusely?
Three recent examples of the official response to serious issues raised by civic, media or even State institutions show how little has changed.
The first is the subversion of one of the most significant advances towards a responsive, accountable system of government, the development of the Ombudsman's office. Over the last decade, the Ombudsman, Mr Kevin Murphy, has built on the work of his predecessor, Mr Michael Mills, and created a powerful instrument for vindicating the rights of ordinary citizens.
The Ombudsman does not have the power to enforce his own decisions. The effectiveness of the office depends on the simple logic that, since it is itself an arm of the State, the State will accept its findings and recommendations. This has always been the case - until now. Last month, the Ombudsman took the unprecedented step of issuing a special report to the Oireachtas, dealing with the failure of the Revenue Commissioners to accept the results of an extensive investigation. The issue was the Revenue's refusal to make full refunds of income tax wrongly taken from two widows.
In response to the report, the Revenue claimed it did not have the statutory powers to compensate the victims. The Ombudsman said the Revenue had done precisely that in other cases. He described the Revenue response as "at best disingenuous and possibly mischievous". He pointed out that if the Revenue got away with rejecting his recommendations, the Ombudsman system would become potentially unworkable.
What has been the Government response? Practically nothing. One of the few mechanisms for making the State transparent is on the brink of collapse and no one seems to care.
The next example is the Department of Justice's extraordinary decision last week to place Ireland in the company of China, Egypt and Turkey as the only countries to have denied Amnesty International access to its prison system.
Amnesty's request for access was originally sent by its secretary-general, Ms Irene Khan, last January, to the then minister for justice, Mr John O'Donoghue. The research was to investigate if racism exists as a serious issue in the Irish prison system. There was no response.
Follow-up calls from the secretary-general's office to the Department of Justice were ignored over the next six months, under both Mr O'Donoghue and the newly-appointed Minister, Mr Michael McDowell. In September, Mr McDowell came to a decision: there would be no access because the Department has commissioned its own study "to ascertain the awareness among prison staff and prisoners of cultural diversity".
Mr McDowell refused to meet or even speak on the telephone with Ms Khan - a figure who commands enormous international respect - to discuss its implications. The refusal to engage with Amnesty - which is regularly cited by the Department of Foreign Affairs in its commentaries on the rest of the world - makes it clear the Department of Justice is not willing to be accountable.
THE third example is the extraordinary handling of the allegations against Mr Séamus Brennan in the Sunday Independent. As a case study of official responses to important questions, this is all the more stark because, it now seems clear, the Minister had nothing to hide.
Mr Brennan was not named in the initial Sunday Independent article but both he and the Taoiseach knew he was the person against whom the allegation was being made. As Mr Ahern told the Dáil: "It was clear who they were talking about. Minister Brennan contacted me over the weekend to tell me there was an article about him which would appear."
It is also clear that Mr Brennan knew that the allegation had no substance. By mid-week, long before the inquiry by his Department secretary had concluded, he was able to tell the Dáil this in the most emphatic terms.
So why didn't he just say so, either before the article was published,or immediately afterwards? Why, in his first public comment on the issue did he say: "I don't know from reading the piece [in the Sunday Independent] whether it is one Minister, or 10 Ministers or over what period it is?"
It is also remarkable that the investigation was conducted by the Minister's own Department. Without questioning the integrity of the officials who carried out the inquiry, it is obvious that no one should be placed in the position of investigating allegations against their own boss. As in the other cases, there seemed to be no sense at all that accountability requires independent scrutiny.
And if this is how the system behaves when there is nothing to conceal, just imagine how it might react if it actually had something to hide?