Miriam Lord: Frances shows how to indulge in a little conscious uncoupling

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow had a very good phrase for it.

“Conscious uncoupling.”

She famously used it to describe her amicable divorce from rock star husband, Chris Martin.

But for the former tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald, conscious uncoupling was more a state of mind.

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Former Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan would understand as a fellow practitioner of this particular form of mindfulness, known to aficionados as ‘forgetfulness’.

We’ve been getting a masterclass in it at the disclosures tribunal in recent weeks.

Conscious uncoupling, in this situation, would appear to be an ability to focus solely on personally non-threatening issues while very important but potentially damaging matters are swirling around your ears.

Although, to be completely accurate, the term as it related to Frances Fitzgerald when she was battling to save her cabinet seat last year would be “unconscious uncoupling”.

She was finally forced to resign when the Opposition refused to accept her protestations that she had no memory of an urgent communication concerning whistleblower Maurice McCabe and a proposed Garda strategy to undermine his motivation and credibility at a private commission of inquiry.

Opening stint

“I resigned to avoid a general election,” she explained at the start of her two-hour opening stint in the witness box.

When the controversial email landed in 2015, McCabe and the handling of his allegations of Garda malpractice were proving very toxic to careers in the force, in politics and in the Department of Justice.

So serious and all as this communication must have been at the time, it made almost no impression on Fitzgerald. Very busy woman, and all that.

Frances disremembered about it twice last year, which meant that freshly minted Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had to go into the Dáil on two occasions to revise his defence of his new minister for business and enterprise, late of the Department of Justice.

He was very vexed.

The resulting political mess nearly brought his Government down.

The curious question of what the incurious minister for justice knew of this proposed legal approach to the publicly lauded and politically toxic McCabe, and how she dealt with it, was explored yesterday at the Charleton tribunal.

This is where it gets complicated.

It seems, by her own words, that she was clearly very aware of that email – which bounced around a large number of advisers without and within her office – and its serious import

Because while Frances Fitzgerald has always insisted she has very, very little recollection of the email sent alerting her to the fact that lawyers for the commissioner were intending to adopt an aggressive line of questioning, her testimony flatly contradicted this.

She may have told the Seanad last year: “I get thousands of emails. I don’t remember reading that email, as I said, but it’s likely that I read it”, but it certainly didn’t sound that way yesterday.

It seems, by her own words, that she was clearly very aware of that email – which bounced around a large number of advisers without and within her office – and its serious import.

Asked by a tribunal lawyer, Diarmuid McGuinness SC, why she didn’t think it necessary to consult her advisers about its potentially incendiary contents, the former tánaiste replied: “I made a conscious decision, obviously, not to interfere in the commission of investigation in any way.”

Hot potato

She added she also made “a conscious decision” to do nothing and just let the commission chairman deal with everything.

Furthermore, she found the email “confusing”.

Also, “it was difficult to know how to read it”.

McGuinness was intrigued. How so? “Because you’d want to know the context in which it was being raised.”

So did the minister ask one of her many advisers, given that this was Maurice McCabe? The man was a walking political hot potato, and she knew it.

Eh, no.

Which was very confusing, when we were led to believe that the minister hardly gave a second thought to the email, which may or may not have been read sometime over the weekend it was received.

And when we thought, and the Dáil was told, that the crucial message at the heart of it didn’t apparently make it to the minister’s ears until a year after it was sent, at the time news of the alleged campaign against McCabe became public.

That’s what the Department of Justice was saying last year too.

A spokesperson said in November that they were “aware in general terms in May 2015 of an issue having been raised by counsel for Sergeant McCabe following the exchanges at the commission hearings and the then minister was informed at that time in the context of it being a matter for the gardaí”.

Except she didn’t know the context, apparently.

But back to Deputy Fitzgerald’s consciousness raising exercise.

Did she not think of asking her lawyers to talk to Nóirín's lawyers? She wasn't prohibited from doing that. She didn't, no

“Did you not ask yourself, ‘What is going on’?” wondered the lawyer. Did she not ask herself: “What is the commissioner doing down there with this?”

Not really, explained Frances, because it was nothing to do with her. She was just the minister. It was all the business of “down there” at the commission.

Cruel

Did she not think of asking her lawyers to talk to Nóirín’s lawyers? She wasn’t prohibited from doing that. She didn’t, no.

The only fragment from the email that Frances Fitzgerald has always been able to remember was its last line, which advised her that it was not her “function” to get involved in the inquiry. She relied upon it again on Wednesday.

Barrister McGuinness, casting a professional eye over the wording of this line, didn’t seem to agree. It didn’t “contemplate or discuss interfering” with the commission of inquiry, something the then minister was anxious not to do.

Michael McDowell, who represents Maurice McCabe, will be questioning his Leinster House colleague today. Which should be interesting.

Meanwhile, the cruel nature of politics was on show in Dublin Castle when a major economic conference took place at the far end of the castle yard. The Taoiseach attended, as did Heather Humphreys, who became Business and Enterprise Minister when Frances was consciously uncoupled from Cabinet.

The former tánaiste and minister was calm and unruffled when she gave her evidence.

But one phrase was missing.

“No hand, act or part” hasn’t figured.

Yet.