More women might enter politics, ventured the American writer and academic Maureen Murphy, if it wasn’t so much trouble having to put make-up on two faces. Current events indicate that if certain male politicians had to apply their own make-up instead of having professionals do it for them they would have no time to run the country.
Even Mary Lou McDonald, it would seem, is too busy with cosmetics to point out Fianna Fáil’s and Fine Gael’s rank hypocrisy in deeming her party too deplorable to consort with while they eagerly schmooze the ignominious Michael Lowry in their effort to hatch their next joint government.
If you want to identify what caused the low election turnout look no further than this dance of the seven veils with a man whom both parties have previously adjudged unfit even to be in the same room as them. It’s the public trust thing, stupid. Fine Gael, who dumped him, and Fianna Fáil, who advised Lowry never to darken the Dáil door again, are now playing government-formation footsie with him. Is it any wonder there is voter cynicism?
After the Moriarty tribunal’s final report was published Lowry was regarded as a political pariah. The Tipperary Independent TD was exhorted to resign his seat by an all-party Dáil motion. In that March 2011 debate opposition leader Micheál Martin read into the record Moriarty’s conclusions that it was “beyond doubt” Lowry, as the minister for communications, gave “substantive information” to businessman Denis O’Brien relating to the State competition for a lucrative mobile phone licence; that he was an “insidious and pervasive influence” on the process; that he engaged in a “cynical and venal abuse of office”; and that his behaviour was “profoundly corrupt to a degree that was nothing short of breathtaking”.
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“We, therefore, believe Deputy Lowry should consider his position and resign from Dáil Éireann,” the Fianna Fáil leader pronounced.
In his contribution to the debate then taoiseach Enda Kenny espoused: “We must rehabilitate the idea of civic virtue and the idea of the duty and nobility of public service.”
Political promises, as voters are constantly reminded, are made to be broken. A year later Lowry was bragging about accompanying delegations to meet various government Ministers, whom he declined to name, and insisted he had a right to Cabinet access as a TD.
In January 2015 he had no compunction about canvassing the taoiseach for a directorship on a State board for an associate of his when he sent a note across the Dáil chamber to Kenny, with the juvenile rider that the female aspirant was “not bad looking”.
After the 2016 general election the mask slipped further. In 2018 Kenny’s successor as taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, replied to a Dáil question that, while there was no written agreement, Lowry enjoyed access to Ministers because he supported the government. The questioner was Micheál Martin, then the opposition leader.
This you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement has ensured Lowry’s repeated poll-topping re-election by voters grateful for the spoils he has delivered for Tipperary, facilitated by his erstwhile condemners in government. Among the “achievements” he claims on his website are €1.6 million from the sports capital fund; several million for a digital hub in Roscrea; €4 million for Nenagh Hospital; €9 million for a Borrisokane school and €8 million to regenerate Thurles.
All pretence at disapproval petered out long ago. Yet nothing has changed in the interim other than Lowry’s and his company’s Circuit Criminal Court conviction in 2018 for tax offences.
The tribunal’s findings still stand, contrary to Lowry’s prediction during the 2011 Dáil debate that “in the fullness of time [the tribunal’s] contribution will be exposed for what is – a scandal of truly epic proportions”. Though he denies them he has never sought to have them overturned in court.
Even before the tribunal was established in December 1997 he misled the Dáil by disingenuously creating an impression that he did not have an offshore bank account whereas in fact he had four of them. In addition to the report’s nauseating contents about the phone licence it revealed how Lowry had tried to double the rent at the public’s expense for a State body’s tenancy in a building owned by Ben Dunne, the supermarket boss who had paid for his house extension in Tipperary.
Instead of rehabilitating “the idea of civic virtue”, as Kenny advocated in 2011, he and his party rehabilitated Lowry, sending out a subliminal message that “profoundly corrupt” behaviour by a government Minister is acceptable. The attitude that it’s all okay now has leached into the public subconscious. It is troubling and astonishing that journalists and politicians conjecturing about the potential configuration of the next government rarely – if ever – mention Lowry’s history or that it could dissuade parties from doing business with him.
Simon Harris and Micheál Martin may argue that the 12,538 people who voted for him in Tipperary North last month are entitled to representation. If that is their justification the same consideration should be given to those who voted for Sinn Féin, the second biggest party in the incoming Dáil.
If Fianna Fáil does not intend embracing Lowry as a government component – with the sickening possibility of returning him to Cabinet – or even as a government-adjacent TD, Martin should publicly state so and explicitly state his reasons. There is too much at stake for the nod-and-wink double standard to continue. Not least is the health of our democracy. The tribunal has cost the people more than €68 million. That will only prove to be money well spent if the people are assured that abuse of political office will never be tolerated.
It is almost 14 years since the Moriarty report was published. That is as long as it took to produce it after the Oireachtas established the tribunal in 1997. Upon its publication in March 2011, copies were sent to the Garda Commissioner, the DPP and Revenue. The Garda press office has said CAB is still investigating its contents.
One can only imagine how motivated – or otherwise – those public servants must feel when they see Deputy Lowry swanning into government-formation talks. If 14 years’ tribunal work by a High Court judge can be so readily airbrushed by successive governments what’s the point of bothering? What’s the point of even voting?