A few years ago, a beer company had an ad campaign that appealed rather brilliantly to the Irish psyche. It was based on the idea that whenever you’re faced with a choice between A and B, there’s always C.
When things go wrong in Irish governance, A is cock-up and B is conspiracy. But reading the Fennelly report last week, it struck me that there is a C. Let’s call it “cockspiracy”. What I mean by this is that we have a governing culture that actually conspires to cock up. It has a wilful, planned, systemic incompetence.
This is not the chaotic incompetence of people who don’t know what they’re doing. Rather, it’s a system that goes out of its way not to know what it’s doing. It goes to great lengths to do things the wrong way.
It’s a pity that the discussion of the Fennelly report has focused so much on the mysteries of the Taoiseach’s behaviour. In fact, for anyone who reads the report, it’s clear enough what the Taoiseach did. He pulled a stroke.
Political problem
Enda Kenny was faced with a political problem. Martin Callinan, as Garda commissioner, had become a political liability – not because of the taping of phone calls at Garda stations (an issue on which he did nothing wrong), but because he had called whistleblowers disgusting and had treated the raising of serious and substantial questions by honest officers as insubordination. He had clearly lost public confidence. But the problem was that Kenny had backed him all the way.
Hence the Taoiseach’s political dilemma: how do you sack someone you’ve backed so strongly? Kenny did the cute-hoor thing: seize on a separate issue on which Callinan was blameless and use it as an opportunity to suddenly change tack. Send a messenger with a metaphorical revolver and hope the commissioner understands what to do with it. Problem solved. A supposedly new crisis explains the sudden change of course, and you don’t have to sack the man in an honest, open, transparent and lawful way.
The key thing to understand is that in the world of cockspiracy this is a piece of brilliance. If you were Enda you’d have given yourself a big wink in the bathroom mirror. You were being sucked in to a political whirlpool and now you’re standing on the shore, home and dry.
You needed two bodies, Callinan’s and that of his close ally Alan Shatter. The manoeuvre of blaming Callinan for the thing he didn’t do (the tapes) allows you to make it look like you’re making him accountable for the things he did (rage at the whistleblowers). Callinan’s resignation makes Shatter’s inevitable. But you didn’t lay a finger on either of them. The handsome chap in the mirror deserves a “Fair play to you, boy!”
But here’s the thing: this kind of stroke, this ingenious opportunism, is possible only in a system that is deeply, thoroughly and deliberately screwed-up. If the people whom we trust to run the country for us were doing basic things properly, it couldn’t happen.
Kenny’s manoeuvre depended entirely on wilful confusion. It was a yoking together of two opposites: Callinan’s responsibility for his mishandling of the whistleblowers and Callinan’s innocence of any wrongdoing in the taping affair. In a system of governance that functioned rationally and competently, this simply couldn’t be done. The flow of information, the procedural rigour, the formulation and recording of decisions would make this entirely illogical leap impossible.
Systems of management in any organisation have a primary principle: clarity. But clarity would have strangled Enda’s opportunistic stroke at birth. The stroke is a creature of fog and night.
We see this at its starkest at the fateful meeting of March 24th, 2014, after which the secretary general of the Department of Justice was sent to Callinan’s home with the metaphorical revolver. This was a very high-level meeting, involving the Taoiseach, the Attorney General, two departmental secretaries general and (in part) the minister for justice. But we will never know what was said at it because these participants gave Fennelly sharply different accounts of what he regarded as “crucial” points. We will never even know what the final decision was. Nobody wrote it down.
Fennelly, clearly gobsmacked, writes that it is “beyond argument that good administration would require that a proper record be kept of such an important decision”.
Bad administration
The judge is right, of course. But what he understandably doesn’t say is that “good administration” is not at all the same as what the Taoiseach would regard as a good stroke. The stroke demands bad administration – no records, no clarity, no actual relationship between supposed cause (the taping) and desired effect (the resignation).
Records, clarity and rationality would mean a trail of accountability, and accountability is the enemy of the stroke. It is the slug powder that kills the slippery, slimy way of doing things on which our unreformed governing culture thrives. Hence cockspiracy, the studied incompetence that leaves room for cute-hoorism.
The Fennelly report shows that cockspiracy is not an abuse of the Irish system of governance. It is the system.