Over the weekend a new anti-corruption group, headed by Frank McBrearty Jnr., was launched at the Mansion House in Dublin. This is a welcome development. I was contacted some weeks back by a representative of the new group but have not heard back since. The Irish Times reports on it today:
He announced the new group at a public meeting held on Saturday afternoon in Dublin’s Mansion House. He likened the new group to the One in Four campaign, in that it will seek to deal with what he terms as victims of the abuse of power by State institutions.
Mr McBrearty was accompanied at the launch by eight other speakers on the platform, including TDs Dan Boyle, Joe Higgins and Sean Crowe, as well as journalists Frank Connolly and Eamonn McCann; Aisling Reidy of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties; and Labour Cllr Nicky Kelly and Osgur Breathnach – both of whom were wrongly convicted for the Sallins train robbery in 1976.
About 250 people attended the meeting, including Labour Party justice spokesman Joe Costello.
Mr McBrearty said the primary aim of the group was the setting up of an ombudsman similar to the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan.
This weblog welcomes the aims of Anti-Corruption Ireland, and hope that Irishcorruption.com can assist in highlighting corruption in Ireland.
That reminds me – the Center for Public Enquiry (Inquiry?) has been funded to the tune of several million euros, and are popping up all over the place, but there’s little information on who they are (did Hot Press do an article?) and no web presence at all, which is strange in this day and age.