We have just started 2025, but there are already signs that our political establishment want to turn the clock back.
Bureaucrats in Dublin City Council want to crack down on soup kitchens claiming people should not eat food on the street. Their real motivation is to render the homeless problem invisible, especially to visitors. This is the same thinking that led Waterways Ireland to spend €790,769 on erecting fences on the Grand Canal to stop people erecting tents on the Grand Canal.
Thankfully, over one hundred people attended a protest against Dublin City Council’s proposal. And People Before Profit Councillors Conor Reddy and Hazel De Nortúin immediately put down a resolution to prevent this move.
Meanwhile at government level, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are doing a deal with the Regional Independents and the Healy Raes to form a government.
The Regional Independents are led by Michael Lowry who was a former chairperson of the Fine Gael Parliamentary party. Lowry was forced to resign after major allegations of corruption.
- The Moriarty Tribunal concluded "beyond doubt" that Lowry was a tax evader and had assisted businessman Denis O'Brien's ESAT Digifone consortium in acquiring a lucrative mobile phone licence in the mid-1990s, during Lowry's time as Communications Minister. O'Brien went on to become one of the richest men in Ireland. The report noted Lowry's "insidious and pervasive influence" on the process.
- In 1997 McCracken Tribunal revealed supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne had paid IR£395,000 for an extension to Lowry's home in Tipperary. The Moriarity Tribunal also heard that Lowry sought to influence rent payable by then state-owned Telecom Éireann for Marlborough House to a company owned and controlled by Dunne.
The Irish elite dealt with corruption by setting up Tribunals. If you were a working-class person who steals from a supermarket, you are hauled before the District Court and possibly jailed.
But if you were a top politician like Lowry, you were dealt with by a Tribunal that took years to issue reports and was often bogged down with many legal challenges. The Moriarity Tribunal, for example, was set up in 1997 and only published its final report in 2011.
But even, more bizarrely, the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal had first to be sent to the Gardai for them to investigate. No prosecution could follow directly from the findings of its report. The Gardai in turn were supposed to send on the outcome to the Director of Public Prosecution.
It has now been revealed that the Gardai only sent its file on the Moriarity Tribunal to the DPP only a few weeks ago… 14 years after the final report of the Tribunal… 27 years after it was first set up.
Many allegations against Lowry, which were confirmed by Tribunals, led to no official state punishment.
Instead, Michael Lowry is now leading a group of independent TDs through discussions on government formation. And Simon Harris and Michael Martin think this is ok.
It shows what type of future we are facing in Ireland.