Politics

As the Tribunal of Inquiry into protected disclosures and Certain Other Matters prepares for its opening statement from counsel in mid-June, Peter Charleton must be wondering what he’s let himself in for. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Supreme Court justice initially agreed to chair a commission of inquiry, a much more sedate affair than a tribunal. Set up by Michael McDowell in 2004 during his tenure in the department of justice, commissions of investigation addressed several concerns at the time about tribunals of inquiry, principally their ratcheting costs. But commissions are held mostly behind closed doors, and when it emerged shortly after Charleton’s appointment that false allegations of child abuse had been made against whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe, the public clamour led the government to upgrade the commission to a tribunal of inquiry. A bigger deal altogether. He said there would be two modules in the tribunal – the first module will concern the reaction of Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan, former commissioner Martin Callinan and others at the highest command level to disclosures made by Sgt McCabe. Maurice McCabe rejected plans for a Commission of Investigation calling instead for the inquiry to be held. The second module will deal with members of the force who made protected disclosures and whether they were mistreated as a result. Fortunately, although fresh scandals continue to emerge from An Garda Síochána almost weekly, from investigations into breathalyser statistics and accounting practices in Templemore to reports of potential security breaches as senior officers use third- party email accounts from Gmail, the Tribunal has avoided attracting further terms of reference as each new report of alleged Garda misbehaviour emerged. Charleton is of course no stranger to Garda tribunals. He was the lead counsel for the Morris tribunal into Donegal Garda misbehaviour in its initial years. Set up in March 2002, the tribunal delivered its final report in 2008, although Charleton departed in 2006, appointed a judge to the High Court. A retired president of the High Court, Frederick Morris headed one of two Garda tribunals at the time, while Justice Robert Barr headed a tribunal into the Abbeylara siege which ended in the death of John Carthy, shot by gardaí. Coincidentally, Barr’s son Anthony, also a barrister, acted for the Morris tribunal alongside Charleton. The latest whisleblowers inquiry (or as it wishes to be known, the Disclosures tribunal, and as it will probably become known among journalists, the McCabe or Charleton Tribunal) has one advantage over the Morris Tribunal. While the Donegal inquiry looked at a wide range of issues covering over a decade, the terms of reference for – and indeed the events which are being scrutinised by – the latest probe are much narrower. Even so, it could take some time to complete its work. Justice Barr looked at the events of a 25-hour siege, and the events leading up to it. His inquiry ran for four years. Charleton moved swiftly from the first. First announced early in February, before month’s end he had delivered impressive opening remarks, pointedly observing that lies told to the tribunal would be a “waste of what ordinary men and women have paid for”, and that the Irish people expected the tribunal to do its work expediently. Lies are a big thing for him: in a 2006 book, ‘Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit’, Charleton reflected on the criminals he had worked with, developing the idea that lying opens up the evil within all of us. His opening remarks also sought to shut down the possibility of delays to the tribunal’s work by way of appeals to the High Court, arguing that because so many previous tribunals had led to appeals to the High Court and Supreme Court, most important issues relating to tribunals were pretty much settled law. He also sought to shut down any claims of journalistic privilege which might impede the tribunal’s investigations. An interim report followed in mid-May, dealing mostly with the logistics of setting up the tribunal. It did reveal that at least some early concerns about journalistic privilege had been allayed, as both former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan and his successor Nóirín O’Sullivan, and Garda press office superintendent David Taylor, had waived any privilege in relation to any allegedly confidential communication with journalists. Born in 1956, Charleton was educated at St Mary’s College, Dublin, Trinity College and King’s Inns, before being called to the bar in 1979. He has written several books on criminal law in Ireland, as well as articles for both Irish and international journals on family law, constitutional law, the law of evidence, criminal law and judicial review. He has lectured at King’s Inns, Trinity, Fordham University in New York and Beijing University. He is unpaid chairman of the National Archives advisory council. He was appointed from the High Court to the Supreme Court in 2014. A noted musician, he was a founder member of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, and is formerly a member of the board of the Irish Baroque Orchestra. He is often described as “off beat” and “quirky”, which may be legal code for “well rounded” and “has interests outside the law”.   By Gerard Cunningham

The 2015 Summer refugee ‘crisis’ was the moment when refugees entered the European consciousness as an existential dilemma. Many European media asked if this influx represented the death of the Schengen line, the free travel zone and even of the European project. The pan-European furore that followed contributed to the Brexit vote. Indeed it is difficult to think of that time without being reminded of scenes of refugees at Calais attempting to make their way across the sea to Britain and of Nigel Farage campaigning in front of a billboard depicting long lines of refugees. However, to a large degree Irish society has escaped the pan-European panic. There have been no terrorist attacks in Ireland, and neither immigration nor the recent refugee influxes have been a major factor in any of our elections. News this week that one of the perpetrators of the London Bridge attack spent time in Ireland is notable as the first time Ireland has featured in international discussions of Islamist terrorism. On the face of it Ireland would appear to have been unscathed by the xenophobic political tensions that have been spurred in other countries. However, consider Graph 1 on Irish asylum applications. 2015, the year of the refugee crisis, should have been the year in which Ireland accepted its most refugees. And yet it is was in 2002 that applications peaked for asylum, at 11634.     Perhaps the recession led to the drop, yet if we look at the table it really begins to plummet in 2003 and 2004, boom years of great economic prosperity in the Republic, before gradually dropping to a recent low of 916 in 2013. For the sake of clarity it is important to note that an asylum-seeker is an applicant for refugee status – someone hoping to be declared a refugee. Like other European nations Ireland is obliged through international treaties to accept refugees. Refugees are defined as those who are forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. The situation in countries like Syria is so bad that many of them are accepted to be refugees, without question: they do not have to go through the process of seeking asylum. For example in Germany in 2016 57% of Syrians entered as refugees. The figures for people entering the country as asylum-seekers are different from those entering as refugees. Before 2015 Ireland’s efforts went almost entirely into asylum-seekers rather than refugees. So a big reason for the strange graph is that most of the crisis in 2015 were refugees, not asylum seekers. The Irish Refugee Programme (IRPP) was set up as a direct response to the 2015 refugee crisis. By the end of 2016 760 refugees had arrived through it. The State committed to taking in 4,000 people over three years through the IRPP. The commitment of the IRPP applies to two different groups of people. The first group is made up of people living in Turkey and Lebanon who have fled the Syrian war and already have refugee status. The second is made up of people who arrived in Greece and Italy by sea from Syria whose asylum applications are to be assessed in Ireland. 520 of the 760 refugees accepted in 2016 belonged to the first group, 240 to the second. It is most dramatic to note that Germany, albeit with demographic demands, will take a million refugees over the same period. To further complicate matters it is important also to note the success rates for asylum-seekers in different countries. Ireland’s is particularly low. For example over the period 2012-14 Ireland accepted only 677 asylum applications from asylum-seekers. Norway accepted 20 times as many per head of population. The US accepted 68,317 asylum-seekers in the same period, the most in the world; Germany 48,000; the UK 28,000. During that period the US accepted 16.7% of asylum-seekers; Germany 7.7%; the UK 16%; Ireland 3%. In fact only 21% were rejected with the majority deferred or closed for some reason, including that the asylum-seeker leaves the country. Separate from asylum-seekers and refugees are ordinary migrants, those who come to Ireland for economic reasons, to make a better life for themselves and their families. The total figure for non-nationals in Ireland is 584,000 out of a total population of 4.7 m. The figure of 12.5% of the population is substantially higher than that in Britain where it is 8%, a little more than in the US. However it should be remembered that Ireland’s immigrants mostly arrived in the last twenty years. Other richer countries will have accepted generations of immigration. In recent years the categories have become confused as many asylum applicants are in fact economic migrants attempting to use asylum as a way to enter into wealthy western countries. In spite of how perilous their economic situation can be, abject poverty has not been recognised as a criterion for refugee status. Instead, the Irish State’s suspicion that many asylum applicants are in fact economic migrants in refugee’s clothing lies at the heart of direct provision. In his paper on ‘Social Welfare Law and Asylum-seekers in Ireland’, Liam Thornton sets out how welfare conditions for migrants decreased considerably after direct provision was introduced in the year 2000. Before 2000 asylum-seekers could avail of social welfare like anyone else in Irish society once they had met the necessary conditions. This included payments for medical conditions, non-contributory pensions if the asylum-seeker was over 65, one- parent family payments and child benefit. Asylum-seekers who did not qualify for pensions or single parent allowances could still avail of  the same supplementary welfare allowance that anyone else in the State could qualify for. After the direct provision system was introduced asylum applicants instead received their supplementary welfare as a benefit in kind in the form of bed and board with an additional small payment per adult per week and an additional smaller payment per child per week. The meagre accommodations that ground Ireland’s system of ‘direct provision’ are

Brexit, like the bank bailout, shows how little democratic control we really have in the global economy