Tony Blair was quoted in Tuesday’s Journal saying “society won’t be better if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street”. This comes as Seán FitzPatrick, two of his executives and the Quinns appear, occasionally, in courts and cells. Regardless of the outcome of those individual cases, Blair makes clear he believes that no energy should be expended on prosecuting white-collar criminals.
He’s wrong. I’m not big into hanging, but if hanging it is, then Ireland would be a vastly better place if the collars on certain expensive shirts were swapped for nooses.
A decade ago, long-time senator Joe O’Toole made the same argument as Blair. In 2002, at what we thought was the height of Irish scandals, when the first Flood Tribunal report was published, O’Toole said “I’d rather see them poor and free than rich and in jail”. These are harmless old men, the argument went, there’s no point in sending them to prison now.
Senator O’Toole’s view prevailed. Only Ray Burke was jailed, and him only briefly for failing to pay tax on a cash payment from Century Radio founder Oliver Barry which the Flood Report unambiguously ruled was an ‘enormous bribe’. Neither Burke nor Barry were ever arrested or questioned about the bribe, never mind charged or brought to trial.
O’Toole was wrong, and Blair is wrong, for three reasons. First, regardless of the crime, it is immoral to suggest that some classes in our society are immune to the law. Secondly, as we are seeing, extracting ill-gotten gains is difficult and unlikely to be totally successful; the crooks will be left far from poor. Thirdly, pour encourager les autres.
Things have happened while the Flood Report has been gathering dust in a cellar in Garda HQ. Lots of things. Decisions were made, laws were broken, risks were taken, outcomes calculated.
Greedy men weighed the risk of breaking the law to hang onto their millions and billions. They balanced the odds. The prize was high and, they knew, even when the evidence was plain, the risk of going to jail was very low.
Would those calculations, which contributed to the economic cataclysm that has befallen us, have been tilted differently were Haughey, Burke, Barry, and a few more politicians, businessmen and bishops spending their declining years in Mountjoy jail? We don’t know. But surely people making those calculations would pause.
Perhaps, after pausing, they would have continued their crimes anyway; but perhaps not. If we are to avoid a repeat, we must change the odds. We can’t reduce the rewards of corruption, but we can increase the risk. Crime might not seem so appealing to people whose golfing buddies have swapped the clubhouse for the jailhouse.
Neither might starting illegal wars.
