If there were pigs flying past Tusla’s windows, would anybody notice? Might they say, “oh, look, there go some flying pigs”? Would they phone the Irish Farmers’ Association and say, “if any of your piggeries have lost their porkies, they’ve just flown past our window”? Would they alert the Irish Aviation Authority? The guards? The who, now?
Chances are, if pigs flew past Tusla’s windows, nobody would have noticed. Quite possibly, there are no windows in Tusla. No newspapers either, or radio, or television, or computers with internet access, or water-cooler natters. Perhaps the staff are locked in; never allowed home to shoot the breeze with their families about national news and local gossip.
After the first week’s public hearings at the Charleton tribunal, which is examining the smearing of Sergeant Maurice McCabe, it’s quite possible to imagine the state’s child and family agency entombed deep in the bowels of the Earth, cut off from the cacophony of the human race. How else to explain the blissful ignorance of the social workers who have sworn they had never heard of Ireland’s most famous policeman when they were dealing with an untrue allegation of child rape against him?
“I’m just a wee bit mystified,” confessed Peter Charleton, the Supreme Court judge who gives the impression of a man unaccustomed to not being able to keep up. “You’re aware Leo Varadkar is the taoiseach?” he asked Laura Connolly after she said she only learnt of the whistleblower sergeant’s high profile earlier this year. “Yes,” said Connolly, the drafter of a notification to An Garda Siochana relaying the untrue allegation made against McCabe in August 2013.
Charleton told her there had been prolonged “media storms” over McCabe, but Connolly said they were “not stories that I have followed”.
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“Well, I’m tending to wonder what stories do you follow?” the judge asked. Did she receive Twitter feeds? “I’m not on social media,” said Connolly. “I have no interest in being consumed by the media with regard to negativity, so I don’t follow the news intently.”
Had she heard about a fire in a London tower block last month? She had. “You drive a car and you would have to drive to appointments, I take it,” said Charleton. “What do you listen to [on the car radio]? A local Cavan channel?”
“No, I generally listen to national radio,” replied Connolly, “but I don’t, as a rule, listen to lengthy political broadcasts or news stories of that nature.”
During the period in question, Charleton pointed out, Martin Callinan had resigned as garda commissioner — something that “doesn’t happen every day”; the Fennelly inquiry into garda matters was established; and articles about Miss D, McCabe’s accuser, had appeared in the Irish Independent.
“Do you take a newspaper at all?”
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“I don’t buy newspapers on a weekly basis,” replied Connolly.
Did she and her colleagues ever discuss McCabe during coffee breaks in the office canteen? “If you were not talking about this, I’m tending to wonder what were you talking about?” said Charleton. “I mean, one of the biggest stories that, I suppose, might come along would be — lo and behold — a really hard to explain mistake has been made and we’re attributing . . . that in the wrong . . . Surely that’d be discussed?” Connolly said she had no recollection of such a conversation.
Oscar Wilde comes to mind. For one official dealing with the allegation not to have known who McCabe was might be regarded as a misfortune; but two?
Laura Brophy, a Cavan-based chartered psychologist, blended another client’s case of “digital penetration” into the notification she passed on reviving Miss D’s 2006 complaint. This was six years after gardai and the health service had closed their files, and the DPP had concluded no offence had been committed.
“Had you heard of [McCabe] yourself,” counsel for the tribunal asked Brophy.
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“No,” she replied. The client had referred to him as a garda whistleblower, she said, but this “wouldn’t have struck a chord with me”.
Charleton: “It didn’t ring a bell?” “No.”
The Tusla branch office dealing with the false allegation against McCabe covers counties Cavan and Monaghan, which have a relatively sparse combined population of 136,575 people. As the sergeant-in-charge at Bailieboro station, McCabe would have been well known locally. He would have been familiar to the district’s social workers, frequently attending meetings with them. In fact, he was such a regular presence that one witness mistakenly believed he was the designated liaison officer.
Gerry Lowry, a Tusla area manager, told the tribunal he knew who McCabe was but had never met him. He accepted this was incorrect after a tribunal lawyer cited half a dozen case meetings that Lowry and McCabe had attended between 2004 and 2009.
Why does it matter if anybody in Tusla knew who McCabe was, especially after being informed in May 2014 that the complaint was an error? Because, somehow, Callinan was able to divulge its tawdry essence to Seamus McCarthy, the comptroller and auditor general, and to John McGuinness, the former chairman of the Dail’s public accounts committee (PAC). Both men have informed the tribunal that Callinan told them of the allegation in separate conversations in 2014.
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The social workers said they did not tell gardai about the claim, and there is no evidence they did. Odd, though, that they didn’t recognise who he was.
McCabe’s name was a regular refrain in the news at the time. In the Dail in October 2013, the former justice minister Alan Shatter wrongly accused him and fellow whistleblower John Wilson of not co-operating with a penalty-points inquiry. Shatter’s Dail apology to them in March 2014 was big news. On January 13 that year, McCabe appeared before the PAC in a blaze of publicity. Footage of him arriving at Leinster House has been broadcast so often it has become iconographic. In February 2014, Shatter appointed Seán Guerin, a senior counsel, to review McCabe’s allegations of garda wrongdoing. McCabe won a People of the Year award in December 2014.
It took Tusla nine years to contact McCabe after receiving Miss D’s original allegation. The agency never conducted a risk assessment of him, nor a credibility assessment of Miss D. Tusla’s handling of the case was riddled with mistakes. “There isn’t an error in his favour,” observed Patrick Marrinan, a tribunal barrister.
Cock-up or conspiracy? That’s what Charleton must decide but, following last week’s expose of Tusla’s rampant and perilous ineptitude, conspiracy is looking the least hair-raising scenario.