My nightmares no longer happen in my sleep. They come in daylight while I’m reading a newspaper or listening to a broadcast report tracking the moral disintegration of public life in the globalised world. A most terrifying nightmare is due next week when two new regimes will be ensconced on either side of the Atlantic. The one taking control of the world’s superpower in Washington has a convicted felon at its apex and luxuriates in its own amorality.
The one on this side of the ocean, in this little country that fancies itself as an international referee of political integrity, has shamelessly thrown away its moral compass. At the exact moment when sovereign states need to stand up to Donald Trump’s drill-baby-drill and I’ll-take-Greenland contempt for humankind, the incoming Irish Government is perceptibly hobbled at birth by its involvement with Michael Lowry.
The Tipperary North TD is to Government Buildings what Elon Musk will be to the White House come Sunday, though that may be unfair to the sinister and mendacious X owner, who has not been accused of abusing public office nor been convicted on tax charges. Lowry has, along with being accused of a “profoundly corrupt” attempt to jack up a semi-state company’s rent bill, deceiving Dáil Éireann, “securing the winning” of a lucrative State licence for a businessman who showered him with money, getting his house extended courtesy of another businessman, and keeping schtum about his offshore bank stash when he availed of a tax amnesty.
While Musk is a recidivist liar and Lowry denies he did anything wrong, what makes them twin figures is that they are both kingmakers.
With the French and German governments squaring up to Trump over his threat to grab Greenland from Denmark, Europe badly needs ethical backbone
Musk spent $250m (€243m) getting Trump elected in November and has described himself as the incoming president’s “first buddy”. Lowry got Verona Murphy elected Ceann Comhairle and has negotiated a disproportionately generous share of Government portfolios for his allies in the Regional Independents Group (RIG). Apparently, neither Musk nor Lowry sought a cabinet position for himself. Both are too savvy.
In Ireland, all involved knew it would have stretched public tolerance beyond endurance had the Tipperary deputy been repatriated to cabinet. Instead, he has manoeuvred his associates into the room and has a hot line to the Taoiseach. Lowry knows how power works. Micheál Martin and Simon Harris may be the kings, but he is the kingmaker.
Not true, protest Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, implausibly. Who do they think they’re kidding? Not the 63 per cent of respondents to a Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll who believe the two parties should not be dealing with him. Pretexts about Lowry’s democratic mandate from his constituency are not just pathetic, considering he had a mandate too when the Dáil passed a unanimous motion for him to resign his seat in 2011. They are an insult to the people’s intelligence. They are an insult to everyone who values standards in office. And they are an insult to two senior judges, Brian McCracken and Michael Moriarty, whose tribunals spent 14 years investigating money lavished on Lowry by businessmen Denis O’Brien and Ben Dunne.
In his 1997 report, concluding that the former minister got payments and benefits worth more than £650,000 , McCracken warned that if such behaviour were to go unsanctioned, it would be difficult to condemn those who flouted the law. Moriarty, who found that Lowry had engaged in “cynical and venal abuse of office”, suffered vilification for his efforts. Indeed, he “faced active hostility from some individuals before the tribunal”, Martin remarked during the Dáil debate on the Moriarty Report. “He has done his work with integrity, commitment and skill and he has produced a very comprehensive report. I believe the Dáil and the public should thank him for his efforts,” the then opposition leader declared.
Some thanks he is getting now. Martin and Harris are gambling that Lowry’s influence on their Government will be behind the scenes during their tenure and that, in time, public disgust at his involvement will abate. We, the public, should not allow that to happen. Government at any cost is a cheap and tawdry thing.
Since the revelation in this newspaper last week that the DPP has received the Criminal Assets Bureau’s (CAB) file arising from the Moriarty tribunal’s findings, a new excuse has been trotted out by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that, were they to shun Lowry, they would somehow be interfering in the legal process.
It would have stretched public tolerance beyond endurance had Lowry been repatriated to cabinet. Instead, he has manoeuvred his associates into the room and has a hot line to the Taoiseach
Cardinal Richelieu, one of history’s most famous king-whisperers as chief minister to France’s Louis XIII, would have been unimpressed with such cretinous dissembling. He summarised his philosophy when he posited that “to know how to dissimulate is the knowledge of kings”.
The re-election of a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government was acclaimed after November’s general election as evidence of centrism triumphing here, while the rest of the world was perilously dashing to the far right. Not content with helping to install as US president a man who would otherwise have gone on trial for inciting a riot, Musk now wants to oust Keir Starmer as Britain’s prime minister and is promoting the reactionary AfD party to run Germany.
With the French and German governments squaring up to Trump over his threat to grab Greenland from Denmark, Europe badly needs ethical backbone. Ditto the world. Cynics deride the notion that little Ireland could hold any sway, despite hosting the European headquarters of X and Meta in Dublin 2 and Dublin 4, the multinationals in the vanguard of our age of untruths. Ireland will be sorely tested by both in its obligation to impose EU regulations countering lies and dangerous content on their social media platforms. Can it be trusted to do that?
Not if the formation of the new Government tells us anything. Double standards are already its leitmotif. On the one hand, it righteously – and rightly – stands before the International Criminal Court supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, craving the rule of law. On the other hand, it dismisses two esteemed judges’ shocking findings about Lowry in the interests of hatching its coalition. What this Government tells us is that its principles are for sale.