Whistleblower: Maurice McCabe

givyjoe wrote: »

Christ, I really hope you're not a guard.

wonga77 wrote: »

You can tell the disgruntled guards a mile off...

Sycamore Tree wrote: »

I love how he throws in a grenade and then runs away. Cowardly.

Seth Brundle wrote: »

In fairness, sick leave due to stress in the workplace is quite common. Your assumption that he was off dossing is deliberately disingenuous.
However, his prominence is directly attributed to him trying to do his job and his peers and superiors deliberately preventing him from doing this.

Seth Brundle wrote: »

Hence my point (and my earlier reference to the tree)

Link is behind a paywall.

It shows the dangers of politicians jumping into a case. Mick Wallace and Claire Daly behaved appallingly. At one point Daly said to a whistleblower (who was wrong) "Don't worry. We'll get them in the end". FG don't come out well either- they sacrificed O'Sullivan and Frances Fitzgerald in the face of the political and media onslaught.

Parliamentary privilege is an important element of a functioning democracy.

The right of an elected representative to speak in parliament without fear of any repercussion is fundamental.

The biggest threat to that privilege is it's abuse by politicians.

Not a paywall as such, but a limit on the number of IT articles you can read each week. Try opening it in incognito mode or a different browser.

Would good work not have included asking Noirin about her responsibility as a Commissioner for the actions of all Gardai under her command? About her responsibility to set the culture and tone of the organisation? About the two laptops and four phones that went missing?

This wasn't journalism.

Do you think the false allegations highlighted by others was good journalism? I don't - it was click bait stuff. Some journalists want to believe the worst of every state body.

A new chapter is being written in the greatest scandal in our recent history but it will play out behind closed doors and the media aren't too bothered.

The Charlton Disclosures Tribunal found that there was an extraordinary series of failures in Tusla and “startling inefficiency and indolence within social services” around the creation and dissemination of this baseless allegation of child rape against Sgt. McCabe. The Tribunal stopped short of accusing anyone of deliberately trying to destroy Sgt. McCabe although the effect of this letter was devastating for him and his family and it was at the centre of a whispering campaign against him.

Now, 10 years later, the Tulsa staff concerned are the subject of a fitness to practice inquiry but we won’t hear the evidence against them. What confidence can we have in this inquiry?

Are we living in a country where there are no consequences for those whose manifest incompetence so nearly destroyed an honest man? Do Ministers who were vindicated get the chop while others sail on?

The country is quite simply corrupt.

and various publications, rate us as such, the global corruption index and trading economics both have in the top 10 corrupt countries in the world.

it’s tough to argue when you see what happened to McCabe. When you have an organisation supposedly who are meant to stand up against bullies, corruption, harassment and injustice yet are at least at certain levels more adept at facilitating and causing the type of problems they are supposed to be addressing…..

We're number ten for least corrupt... Not discounting the atrocious treatment of McCabe but there's most definitely far more corrupt countries than Ireland in 2023.

Both organisations rank Ireland as the tenth least corrupt country in the World.

That's not to say there is no corruption in Ireland but we are considered less corrupt than every other country in the World except for nine.

I'm not sure I'd fully agree.

My guess is that we are more corrupt than other developed countries but that the type of corruption we have here isn't picked up by this scale.

You won't give a direct cash bribe to a Policeman here, but I think there's quite a lot of more complex, subtle corruption that just isn't as obvious.

As an example, I've only just come to learn of a news story from about 10 years ago where Michael Martin had monies received from a property developer in his wife's bank account. I think to any reasonable person there's something rotten about that, but here it's just brushed away and even normalised.

IMO there isn't "massive" corruption and criminality in public bodies but rather low level corruption and fraud (e.g. time card) combined with incompetence, fecklessness, laziness, irresponsibility, sloppiness, apathy, and a don't rock the boat/keep the head down culture. I say that as both a former public servant with a lot of experience of dealing with various public organisations and as a current user of public services.

In the case of McCabe, the power that Gardai have probably tends to attract a certain number of undesirables into the career - so if retribution for rocking the boat was going to happen to a whistleblower in any organisation, it was going to be in AGS.

As for the HSE, I am currently dealing with it and its private sector contractors over a homecare package for an elderly relative. The incompetence and stupidity that I have encountered from care staff, managers and administrations is beyond belief. The administrators in the HSE cannot even issue a simple letter in a timely manner and when they do so following my complaints, it is littered with errors and omissions. I've received veiled threats from HSE and contractor employees that if I complain about the quality of service, it may be withdrawn completely. I've received various insinuations that bruising that has appeared on my relative after rough handling (that I have secretly filmed) by homecare staff is actually being caused by me. So while I'm not in a McCabe situation, were this to escalate further, I might be.

We hear about the big HSE court cases where people have been killed or had their lives ruined due to negligence. What we don't hear much about is the 500+ deaths and tens of thousands of injuries that occur each year due to "adverse incidents" in HSE facilities - and these figures don't even include incidents in the voluntary hospitals that our health service is so dependent on. It also doesn't include the massive can of worms that is the homecare sector.

I assumed it would be clear from my post that I meant his honourable action in reporting his colleagues’ failures was a mistake in the sense that it brought all sorts of pain and suffering to him and his family.

It is a national tragedy that honest whistleblowers like Sgt. McCabe were vilified and that chancers like Keith Harrison tried to climb on a bandwagon.

So my experiences are my experiences and your experiences are based on meeting "a neighbour of your sister". OK.

And some of the reasons that people praise homecare staff include

a) they don't know that they are receiving poor service/being abused as they don't know any better

b) the alternative (staying in a shambolic acute hospital or shambolic nursing home) is worse.

c) they are afraid to say anything negative to anyone because of the veiled threats that services will be withdrawn if they do. To bring this back on topic, fear of reprisals is also why there aren't more Maurice McCabes blowing whistles.

And I never said that I have never encountered good care workers or anyone competent - you'd need to read more carefully. If I was to put a figure on it I'd say that 10-15% of care workers that I have encountered are competent. Maybe your sister's neighbour has been lucky enough to encounter one of them.

If you're secretly filming people coming into your/her home, you're breaching their data protection rights and jeopardising any complaints made using that information.