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The Garda Síochána, now assailed on all sides, may be forgiven for recalling another statutory inquiry almost half a century ago, which it was probably instrumental in setting up, and which gave it a virtually clean bill of health.
This was the Money-Lending Tribunal of Inquiry, set up in 1969 after a controversial Seven Days television programme on illegal money-lending alleged that this practice was widespread in working-class Dublin and – more controversially – that the Garda was doing little or nothing about it. The Seven Days team's twice weekly broadcasts attracted at that time an average adult audience of some 620,000.
The objects of the implied criticisms were not slow to organise retaliation. In the Dáil the minister for justice, Micheál Ó Moráin, a choleric and erratic individual somewhat ill-suited for office, announced that a tribunal of inquiry would be held – not into illegal money-lending in Dublin, but into the “authenticity” of the programme. It is difficult to avoid the impression that he was responding to Garda pressure, and was also – given the Fianna Fáil government’s by now manifest hostility to Radio Telefís Éireann under its courageous director-general, Tom Hardiman – taking conscious political aim at the messenger rather than at the message.
The tribunal was unique in many ways. For one thing, it reported a little over eight months after it was set up: RTÉ’s execution would not be unduly delayed.
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For another, it featured an imposing array of RTÉ talent, including not only the man most directly responsible for the programme, Muiris Mac Conghail, but others who have since gone to the great studio in the sky. RTÉ's head of news, Jim McGuinness (who in a previous incarnation as an IRA man had first-hand experience of the Garda) was involved, as were Bill O'Herlihy, the reporter for the programme, who took flight to RTÉ sports shortly afterwards; and John O'Donoghue, who presented it. The initial idea for the programme had come from a segment on Frank Hall's Newsbeat programme, presented by Cathal O'Shannon.
The legal talent engaged was equally impressive. Appearances for the various parties included among many others the two future chief justices Tom Finlay and Liam Hamilton, former taoiseach John A Costello, the future Supreme Court judge Hugh O’Flaherty, future attorneys general Declan Costello and AJ Hederman and, last but by no means least, Paddy MacEntee.
On the journalistic side, authorities on journalistic standards included the editor of this paper, Douglas Gageby, and the editor of the Irish Press, Tim Pat Coogan.
As the tribunal progressed, it was evident that a few corners had been cut here and there by the programme makers, and some errors and exaggerations, largely due to inexperience, had been identified.
But it also became clear that the main burden of the inquiry was a defence of the Garda and a refutation of its alleged inattention to the social problem that the programme had correctly identified.
The tribunal itself had to admit that for eight years prior to the broadcast of the programme there had been almost no prosecutions for illegal money-lending, that the Garda’s initial post-programme investigations into its own activities in this regard had been unsatisfactory, and that the results of the programme had been in some ways beneficial. But it also became clear that the constraints imposed by its terms of reference inevitably led to the exoneration of the Garda. The tribunal duly concluded that the programme was not “authentic”. And, in coming to this conclusion it was undoubtedly assisted by the evidence of the Garda, which, in the aftermath of the programme, had conducted widespread interviews with all those it had featured. These had provided evidence, not necessarily of the prevalence or absence of illegal money-lending itself, but of the unsurprising fact that people whose testimony had been included in the programme were – to put it mildly – less likely to make similar statements to members of the Garda.
At the end of the day, the Seven Days team emerged from this experience bloodied but unbowed. And those with even longer memories may have had reason to recall the advice given by the first editor of the Irish Press, the Republican journalist Frank Gallagher, to his reporters and sub-editors 30 years earlier.
It was not necessary, he instructed them, to report every word of praise spoken by a judge to a policeman.