37 Frank Dunlop

In the early summer of 2009, Frank Dunlop was sent down for eighteen months on a charge of corruption. Because he was a former government press secretary, the culmination of Dunlop’s long-chronicled downfall was a big story. As usual in such circumstances, his incarceration was attended by a spate of vindictive and gloating newspaper headlines, including references to his being taken away handcuffed in a prison van, rather than in the ‘top of the range Mercedes’ in which he had arrived for the sentencing hearing. In a country once famed for its Christian compassion, anything to do with money or politics has recently begun to attract the kind of venom and unpleasantness previously reserved for crimes like paedophilia and premeditated murder.

Dunlop’s crimes were serious and inexcusable. He was also, to be frank, not the most likeable of men, being burdened with a personality characterized by smugness, superciliousness and an intellectual arrogance without visible means of support. When he first appeared before the Flood planning tribunal, these characteristics were abundantly observable. But, after some initial resistance, Dunlop had begun singing like a nightingale. The nation watched him fade away to a shadow of his former self and saw in his eyes the look of humiliation and disgrace. And yet it was noticeable that he did not hide away, nor seek to justify his behaviour. He stood his ground, told his story and accepted his medicine without complaint. He went on working, writing books and studying for a law degree. He faced the music and still held his head high. Dunlop accepted his wrongdoing yet retained his essential dignity as a human being.

Yet, there were those who continued to believe that Dunlop was being highly selective in his musical repertoire, which may have gone some way to explaining the vindictiveness that greeted his incarceration.

Sentencing Dunlop, Judge Frank O’Donnell said the public interest required a custodial sentence, not just a rap on the knuckles. ‘The word must go out from this court that the corruption of politicians, or anyone in public life, must attract significant penalties,’ he told Dunlop. He said that, although there was no readily identifiable victim in this case, Dunlop had actively undermined the confidence of the public in the democratic system and had been motivated by gain.

Dunlop was by now clearly not a well man. He was into his 60s, his life-expectancy radically foreshortened by recent experiences. Contrary to what the judge implied in sentencing, Dunlop had already been grievously punished for his sins. He had been humiliated and disgraced, albeit as a consequence of his own actions. He had, by all accounts, lost his friends. As a national figure, he had become the target of public rage and vindictiveness in a way ‘ordinary’ criminals do not.

Nobody could have suggested that Judge O’Donnell was a man lacking in compassion. Just a few days beforehand, he had suspended the entirety of a sentence of three years’ imprisonment he handed down to a man who was before him on charges of robbing a pharmacy, apparently by demanding money with menaces. The man had twenty-three previous convictions, including a number of counts relating to drugs and robbery. Judge O’Donnell said it was a ‘stupid’ robbery, but accepted that all the cash had been recovered.

Judge O’Donnell pointed out that the charges against Frank Dunlop related to separate acts of corruption in 1992 and 1997, and noted that Dunlop had shown no hesitation in renewing his corrupt practices after a long gap. He had had every opportunity to reflect on what he was doing. The Judge added: ‘Some people who come before me knowingly commit crimes through a haze of addiction. What you did, you did with a long-range, focused, criminal intent.’

It was an odd thing to interject, as though the Judge felt a need to justify himself. What possible connection could there be between Frank Dunlop and the kinds of people Judge O’Donnell was referring to? Indeed, it might be argued that Dunlop, too, was an addict: addicted, like so many of his countrymen, to money and power, and therefore perhaps just as worthy of compassion and mercy as an addict who endangered public safety in order to get his fix.

It is interesting how what is called justice often seems to follow the contours of public piety. Dunlop, with his not entirely attractive personality, made rather a good scapegoat. His jailing at this point went some little way towards appeasing a public seemingly insatiable in its need to see people walk the plank and climb the scaffold. Judge O’Donnell’s words therefore caused a great outpouring of satisfaction in the land.

But the idea that Dunlop’s incarceration would do anything to restore the public’s faith in the planning process was a bit much. Planning in most parts of Ireland is opaque, arbitrary and shot through with a culture of ideological obstructionism. Anyone seeking to use the system soon discovers that it appears to be set up to create a context for people to find unorthodox ways around it. Or, perhaps you might say that it is set up to render necessary some extra-curricular assistance in finding ways around it. One planning authority in the west of the country, for example, requires members of the public who are seeking an appointment with a planner to call immediately after 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, in order to arrange an appointment for the following Monday week. All the available appointments are allocated within a few minutes, and, unless you can get through immediately after nine, you have no chance of getting to see a planner.

Most people seem to think this a normal way of doing business – whether through naïveté, righteousness or poverty, wearily and expensively trudging their way through the myriad of obstacles placed in the way of anyone seeking to get anything done. And when they were told to disapprove of ‘corruption’, most people did that as well, shaking their heads sadly at the criminality of Frank Dunlop and making no connection with their own experiences of bureaucracy and official obstructionism. And Frank, of course, duly obliged by looking the part of a once promising apparatchik gone to the bad. It did not seem to occur to anyone that it was perhaps the most natural thing in the world that businessmen in a hurry might see the need to pursue a different approach – that they might see the benefit of having a man with a brown envelope going around to grease the system’s wheels a little. To suggest that this began or ended with Frank Dunlop was worthy of the constitution of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But somehow this was a lot easier than actually doing anything about it.