Very few Irish people will be able to muster large quantities of sympathy for Donal O’Callaghan, of Cork, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, yesterday. After all, for thirty years, Mr. O’Callaghan claimed pensions from the state to which he was not entitled. His father died in 1987. His mother died in 1979. He was finally caught, collecting pensions on behalf of both of them, in October of 2020.
What hasn’t been much remarked upon is how his case is a tale of state incompetence as much as it is a tale of fraud. After all, the state continued to pay out the pension of a woman who had died for forty-one years after her death, without ever – not even once – in that time, anybody bothering to check that she was alive and well. No checks were carried out for thirty-three years, in the case of the woman’s husband. Funerals were held, flowers sent, months mind masses celebrated, and four decades of anniversaries passed, and still, the Irish state continued to act as if the late Mrs. O’Callaghan were alive. It is right that Donal O’Callaghan is in jail. In a just world, some social welfare inspectors would be sharing his cell.
But it is a remarkable thing, too, to observe: Mr. O’Callaghan’s fraud on the Irish nation netted him, over three decades, half a million euros. About 15,000 per year. Criminal? Yes. A massive harm inflicted on the public? No. Does he deserve to go to jail? Sure. Possibly. It’s hard to get too worked up about it.
But it’s somewhat hard to stomach, is it not, that Mr. O’Callaghan will spend the next three years of his life behind bars, when so many who do objectively greater harm than he did escape prison all the time.
Just last week, I wrote here about the case of Zara McCabe. Zara McCabe, last year, viciously assaulted and stole from a homeless man. It was her 33rd conviction, and not her first for serious assault. Her victim later took his own life. She received 150 hours of community service for her crime. Mr. O’Callaghan, apparently, is regarded as a much greater danger to the public.
In 2018, the husband of a Government Minister’s special advisor was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy. He got a €1,500 fine. Again, Mr. O’Callaghan is a much greater danger to the public, according to our courts.
This page could be filled with examples such as this. The fact of the matter is that if Donal O’Callaghan belongs in prison (and to be fair, he probably does) then there are a great many others who pose a much greater threat to the public who are inexplicably being allowed to walk free.
One suspects, in this case, that Mr. O’Callaghan is not going to prison because of what he did, but because of how foolish he has revealed the state to be.
Noteworthy, after all, is the fact that in all the coverage around his case, and all the mystification (and in some circles, admiration) for the audacity of his crime, nobody in politics has dared call for an investigation into how his crime was possible in the first place.
It was possible only, and solely, because of the utter incompetence of the Irish state.
So here is a question: Where is the internal investigation into how his crime was possible? Where is the Minister demanding answers from her department? Where is the garda investigation into malpractice in the pensions office that paid all this money out? Where is the questioning of the post office who, for thirty years, handed over cash to a man with parents passing a century old? Where were the welfare checks on two people who were soon to have qualified for centurion status, and a letter for the President?
None of those things took place. After his parents died, Mr. O’Callaghan walked into the post office with their pension book as if nothing had happened, and it worked. Who, really, would blame him for taking free money for the next three decades?
There is villainy, and then there is villainy. In Ireland, people like Mr. O’Callaghan always feel the full force of the law, in the end. The people who are the real danger to society are nothing like so unfortunate, when they end up before the courts. It’s a disgrace, if we’re honest with ourselves. If anybody should be in jail here, it’s a representative of the state.
By the way, I’ll leave you with this, from yesterday. On the same day, remember, that Mr. O’Callaghan was sentenced to jail for three and a half years. Some country, isn’t it?
Leon Travers (25) who bit a garda and threw a fan at another after threatening to have "a bullet put in her head" while he was on bail has received a fully suspended sentence.https://t.co/rjtgBa7g1t pic.twitter.com/xnz4dwieNA
— Courts News Ireland (@courtsnewsIRL) February 16, 2022