Michael McDowell

Both the Irish Minister for Justice Michael McDowell and his political party leader Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Mary Harney, believe that it is proper for a minister to make detailed charges in a parliamentary reply, against an individual who is the subject of an ongoing police inquiry and has not been charged with any crime.

Harney also does not see anything wrong with the Irish Government lobbying an Irish-American philanthropist, to end funding of a think-thank, which has the purpose of reporting on issues of public policy and ethics in public and corporate life. In a radio interview today, she queried the right of such an organisation to operate in Ireland. 

Consider the outcry if the Bush Administration sought to close down one of the many US counterparts of the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI), which was established last February,  under the chairmanship of Mr Justice Feargus Flood the former sole member of the Planning and Payments Corruption Tribunal and a former member of the High Court.

The Irish Government lobbied for the cut -off of funding to the Centre

On Tuesday,  Michael McDowell, accused the Executive Director of the CIP, former journalist Frank Connolly, of travelling to Colombia on a false Irish passport in the company of a known member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).In a written reply to a Dáil question, the minister charged that the visit was connected to that of the so-called Colombia Three, and was part of what he termed 'a well-organised sinister enterprise'. He said that Frank Connolly had entered the Farc terrorist-controlled region of Colombia in April 2001, along with his brother, Niall, and a convicted IRA member, Pádraig Wilson.

Niall Connolly and two other Irishmen were detained in August 2001 at Bogota's international airport after arriving from a demilitarised zone then controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

On Wednesday, Frank Connolly told RTÉ Radio One News at One that he had never been to Colombia.

Later on Wednesday, philanthropist Charles Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies  which had agreed to provide funding of €4 million over five years to the CIP, announced that it was cutting off funding.

On RTÉ  Radio One News at One today, Mary Harney made her comments in support of Michael McDowell and the efforts to close down the Centre for Public Inquiry. When the presenter Séan O'Rourke put it to Harney that the role of the CIP was similar to that of newspapers. She waffled on about the media being different.

Frank Connolly has not been charged with any crime.

It is simply staggering that two senior ministers see nothing wrong with the levelling of very serious charges via the device of a parliamentary reply, against an individual who has not been charged with a crime.

Just weeks ago, the Irish State had to apologise in the courts to a member of a family that had been terrorised for more than a decade in the northwest county of Donegal, by renegade members of the Garda Síochána (Irish police). 

Harney said today that McDowell was merely quoting police information that had been provided to him.