Joe Carey (Clare, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Mahon tribunal report. The report confirms so much of what most people believed, namely, that corruption was rampant throughout our political system from the very highest office in the land down. The poor example given and tolerated trickled down the political tree to create a toxic culture of brown bags and shady decisions in our planning system.

The report is detailed and broad. It extends to 3,500 pages and will cost the State €300 million. Many people are rightly concerned about the sheer cost of the tribunal and are asking what actions will now take place to ensure that corrupt practices cannot be repeated.

In that regard I welcome the immediate referral of the report to the Garda Commissioner, the Revenue Commissioners, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Standards in Public Office Commission. Individuals named as corrupt in this report must be held responsible. The length of time the tribunal sat, all of 15 years, was considerable and we must devise and introduce a system of inquiry which will be more efficient and cost effective.

Our democracy is not necessarily as robust as we would like to think. There is no doubt that as the Mahon tribunal publishes its final report our democracy has been rocked and has become very fragile. If as an Oireachtas we do not act decisively on the conclusions and recommendations of the Mahon report we run the risk of undermining that which we should cherish and on which we should work constructively, namely, a strong, robust democratic system on which we can all pride ourselves.

Everyone in this House has a serious problem to deal with. The constitutional referendum on the powers of inquiry for Oireachtas committees failed last year because quite simply the Irish people do not trust politicians with regard to investigations. The Mahon tribunal report somewhat bears this out as it states:

[Corruption] continued because nobody was prepared to do enough to stop it. This is perhaps inevitable when corruption ceases to become an isolated event and becomes so entrenched that it is transformed into an acknowledged way of doing business. Specifically, because corruption affected every level of Irish political life, those with the power to stop it were frequently implicated in it.

Despite laudable exceptions such as the DIRT inquiry, this perception, as presented by Judge Mahon, was clear in people's minds last October. A member of the DIRT inquiry committee was involved in offshore accounting. A principal character of the Mahon tribunal, now deceased, chaired an Oireachtas committee on ethics. This type of carry-on does not go unnoticed and as such the people were not prepared to allow us in our current state have any further powers of inquiry. It gives a clear and unambiguous indication of how we are viewed and mistrusted. It is our task to rebuild trust in the political system and move swiftly on implementing the recommendations contained in the Mahon tribunal report.

Apart from the conclusions of the report, one of its most depressing aspects is that it was widely known by people throughout the State how widespread corruption in planning was and the practice was tolerated. The journalist, Joe MacAnthony, left Ireland disillusioned in 1973, having exposed elements of planning corruption. Garda investigations went down blind alleyways in 1973, 1989 and 1993.

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