Noel Whelan: Government by invisible ink – Fennelly criticisms go unheeded

While there has been intense political controversy about some of the findings in the Fennelly report there can be little dispute about the weaknesses it exposed at the centre of Government decision-making. The handling of the controversy that is the subject of the report was shambolic, secretive and at times deliberately incoherent.

One of the starkest revelations in the report is that no notes were taken of the key meetings or key decisions.

Fennelly says: “The meeting of 24th March in the Taoiseach’s office is the central event in this report. It went on for four hours. The participants were the Taoiseach, the Attorney General, and the Minister for Justice and the secretary general of the Government and, at a later stage, the secretary general of the Department of Justice.

"There is not a single note or record of any kind of that meeting or of its result. It resulted in the dispatch of the secretary general of the Department of Justice and Equality on a very important mission to visit the Garda commissioner to inform him of what was considered to be a grave matter."

Fennelly later reiterates "no note or record, of any kind, was made of what Mr Purcell was asked to say to the commissioner. Regrettably, there is sharp disagreement between the participants at the meeting regarding that precise question."

Fennelly goes on to describe as “unfortunate and extraordinary” an apparently deliberate practice of not taking notes of important meetings.

“It seems to the commission to be beyond argument that good administration would require that a proper record be kept of such an important decision.”

Not a jot was written down or later typed up even though the meetings involved five people, two of them senior officials, and two of them experienced lawyers.

Kenny has about half a dozen private office staff of various grades; any of them would have been capable of preparing a quick memorandum on the purpose and outcomes of the meeting if he had bothered to ask them.

Although it is 10 days since the report was published there has been no acknowledgment of these failings exposed by Fennelly and no proposal to redress the shortcomings he identified.

No comment

Kenny made no comment on Fennelly’s criticism of the failure to record decisions in his statement responding to the report.

The Tánaiste also had nothing to say on the point.

When asked on RTÉ radio specifically about the absence of any notes, Minister for Health Leo Varadkar said "right or wrong, this is the norm".

He later said that important decisions taken at meetings involving Ministers and top Government officials should be formally recorded. "The manner in which the Government discusses significant pieces of business should be re-examined in light of the findings of the Fennelly Commission. "

Neither he nor the Government has told us who should carry out that review.

When asked last week on Newstalk the Minister for Communications Alex White expressed himself surprised that no notes were taken – but not very surprised.

He said: “I was a little surprised that there were no notes at all, but at the same time, from what we know about the nature of that meeting, I think events were moving reasonably quickly, and it doesn’t surprise me that there wasn’t a detailed note, but it does surprise me that there was no note at all.”

When White was pressed if there existed now a general practice among Minister and officials of not taking notes, he said he “would keep a note on meetings, although there may not be time to take detailed notes in a fast-paced meeting”.

However, he said one of his officials “would take notes certainly where decisions were being made...When decisions are being made it’s absolutely good practice, to say the least of it, for there to be good note-taking.”

He went on to say he keeps a note of meetings where he can. “I do keep a note, my own personal note of what happened.”

These ministerial comments suggest that the record-keeping in Government is all very hit-and-miss – and deliberately so.

You would think Government departments and Ministers, like every parish council or school board, could designate someone to take an appropriate note of what occurred at meetings.

Politically selective

Instead, Ministers are not having notes taken of key encounters and are being politically selective about what they reduce to writing. This unminuted form of government undermines transparency and frustrates the search for the truth, as it did for the Fennelly commission.

At one time the Civil Service could have been relied on to resist the casual attitude of their political masters to maintaining records for future scrutiny. The Fennelly report suggests, however, that senior civil servants are not only tolerating this government by invisible ink but are themselves mirroring this behaviour.