About a week ago, the Standards in Public Office Commission issued the findings of its investigation into Monaghan County Councillor Seamus Treanor. The media coverage of these findings was predictable, and uniform. “SIPO finds against Monaghan councillor who published allegedly ‘racist’ election leaflet”, said the Journal. “SIPO issues findings against Monaghan Councillor”, reported RTE. And on, and on, it went.
As is almost always the case in these matters, the findings were reported as fact, and almost nobody reported what those findings were, or considered the basis for them. It is useful to do that, here and now.
SIPO’s findings in its report begin on page 19, and run to page 23. They are structured into three different sections. The first section is “findings in relation to assertions in leaflet”. This is, by some distance, the most important section, because everything else flows from that.
In that section, SIPO finds that remarks made in an election leaflet by Councillor Treanor were “inaccurate” and that the inaccuracies were “particularly egregious” because they lead to an “inflammatory them versus us” narrative with regard to immigration and migrants.
In other words, and in plain English, they state that they find that what he said on his leaflet was wrong. Seamus Treanor disputes this, but in truth, that doesn’t matter very much. The bigger question is this: What is the Standards in Public Office Commission doing, in setting itself up as a fact-checker for political leaflets?
Every other finding, after all, that it makes against Councillor Treanor, flows from this first set of findings. Because what he said was – they find – wrong, then they also find him guilty of breaching the code of conduct for councillors, failing to maintain proper standards of integrity, and a range of other charges.
SIPO is not a legal body, and it has no power of sanction. But it is a quasi-legal body: That is to say, it is governed by legal processes, and is supposed to act within a defined set of rules for itself. Its findings also should have the binding power of precedent: That is to say, the standard by which they have judged Seamus Treanor must now be applied to all other politicians which it investigates.
And those findings are, that by publishing (according to SIPO) inaccurate statements on a political leaflet, Councillor Treanor “breached the code of conduct for councillors”. If that is true, then Councillor Treanor is in good company. If one was to go through every leaflet published by every councillor in the country – not to mention TDs, MEPS, Senators, and all the rest – then one might find that a very great number of “inaccurate” statements are made in those leaflets.
Have all those politicians – which include some of Councillor Treanor’s colleagues in Monaghan County Council – also breached the code of conduct for councillors? Or does this new rule, as one might suspect, apply only to statements about immigration?
All of us, whether we are prepared to admit it or not, know what really happened here: Seamus Treanor touched the button you are not allowed to press. He talked about immigration. He claimed that some people in Monaghan were kicked down the housing list to make way for “migrants”. No-no, said SIPO. They were kicked down the ladder to make way for Syrian Refugees. Syrian refugees are not migrants, they say, and therefore Councillor Treanor is in the wrong.
Yes, because that makes a massive difference to people who were knocked down the housing list, doesn’t it?
The findings against Cllr. Treanor – that he brought politics into disrepute, and so on – all stem from these alleged “inaccuracies”. Not lies – SIPO never uses the word lies – but “inaccuracies”. As if the precise categorisation of the people who were given preference on the housing list is of paramount importance.
It is the kind of nonsense that only a fool would consider important. And it will not, of course, be repeated. No politician will be denounced by SIPO for publishing a leaflet claiming “record levels of economic growth” under their policies when the levels of economic growth are not, in fact, record. That, too, would be an inaccuracy. But it’s not about immigration, so SIPO won’t care. If they did care, they would be investigating a hundred councillors a year.
None of this, of course, will harm Councillor Treanor politically. He has been elected three times, each time saying things about immigration that others will not say. Sometimes, frankly, he goes much too far in his language for my personal tastes. But he says the things he says, and people vote for him. Because he talks about issues that we are all aware of, to some extent, and many of us are afraid to talk about. Voters respect that courage, even if, sometimes, they don’t agree with him 100%.
And that, we all know, is the real problem. If Councillor Treanor had not been elected, SIPO would never have touched this issue. It’s not really an attack, in truth, on Treanor, but on those who voted for him. SIPO are saying to themselves – and people like them – that this is an aberration, and that Treanor was only elected because of “inaccuracies”. In other words, their findings can be interpreted as saying that his voters are fools who were duped.
These findings are, in truth, a disgrace. What SIPO is saying, in effect, is that every councillor in the country needs to run their leaflets past SIPO for fact-checking before publication, lest it later be found that something they said is “inaccurate”. We all know that they don’t mean that. It’s just the only tool they had at their disposal to do what they wanted to do, in this case, from day one: Get Seamus Treanor, and call him a racist.
Most people in Monaghan, I suspect, will see right through it. And thinking people will look at SIPO and wonder why an organisation that was set up to stop brown envelopes and corruption is wasting its time trawling through the election leaflets of political candidates for “inaccuracies”.
Not all political candidates, of course. Just some. Just the ones that they don’t like. That’s what it’s all really about, isn’t it?