Democracy in danger when one man exercises excessive private power
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Version 0 of 1. Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times column today, in which he argues that “the definition of excessive private power is that it ceases to be private”, deserves as big an audience as possible. He is referring to the legal attempt by Ireland’s media tycoon, Denis O’Brien, to prevent light being shed on his banking arrangements. As I write, the Irish Times and RTÉ are in court seeking to clarify the scope of O’Brien’s injunction that has stopped them from reporting a statement made in the Dáil, Ireland’s parliament. I hope lawyers take to heart O’Toole’s argument in which he writes that O’Brien “has accumulated excessive private power” and “been allowed to take effective control of the largest Irish newspaper group and of two of [Ireland’s] three national talk radio stations”. As he points out, O’Brien’s “desire to control what is said about him in the media and in the Dáil has created a constitutional crisis”. He continues: “It is the inevitable result of an individual having too much power. That individual will always see the democratic consequences of his exercise of that power as a purely private matter. O’Brien’s response to the questions raised by Catherine Murphy about his acquisition of Siteserv from IBRC has been a deep and obviously sincere sense of personal affront. He doesn’t see it as a public matter at all. To him, all that is happening is that some busybodies in politics and the media are poking their noses into his private affairs. The problem is that no part of the state has done anything to uphold the other side of the argument and to protect the public interest. The high court, in granting O’Brien an injunction against RTÉ, showed little grasp of the public interest in knowing what a bank it owns is up to”. He defends Murphy, the independent MP, for “doing no more than her democratic duty” by raising questions about O’Brien’s relationship with the IRBC. She is, he writes, trying “to get some accountability for the use of public resources”. He goes on to castigate the minister for finance, Michael Noonan, for his “contemptuous answers” to Murphy’s initial questions about the Siteserv deal. And he criticises three other responses by the state that fail the test of democracy before making a brilliant point about the threat to whistle-blowing should the court maintain that the injunction can overrule parliamentary privilege: “The allegation levelled by O’Brien’s side is that the alleged information Murphy has placed on the Dáil record is ‘stolen’ and thus illegal. If this is upheld, as it seemed to be in the granting of the injunction, all protections for whistleblowers collapse; all information given by concerned insiders will be stolen property”. O’Toole concludes that it should not be up to RTÉ or his newspaper to go to court to protect the right of the people’s elected representatives to raise questions in parliament. “It is time for some arm of the state to show it knows what public interest means”. Bang on the money there, Fintan. See also Lisa O’Carroll’s report on O’Brien’s “scathing attack on his critics”. |