The State will never be able to legislate entirely against liars and cheaters and the public will always be reliant on the role of whistleblowers, a debate on the subject heard last night.
Senator Susan O'Keeffe, one of a four person panel convened to discuss whistle-blowing at the Royal Irish Academy, said how society reacts to whistleblowers should form a central part of the debate.
“We are never going to be able to legislate entirely to make sure that people don’t cheat and lie,” she said.
“It’s just never going to happen. As long as we are human and have those failings, the desire to protect information will continue.”
Last July, the Protected Disclosure Act 2014 came into power, offering qualified safeguards to those with public interest information to divulge. This, the debate heard, made us just the fifth of 28 EU countries to have whistle-blowing legislation.
However, Ms O’Keeffe - a journalist whose investigative work helped lead to the establishment of the Beef Tribunal in the 1990s - said there was something of a misplaced assumption about the public’s relationship with those who disclose information.
“At the beginning we love them, they are great,” she said.
“We actually don’t always believe that they are a good thing. Somehow or another they stepped out of line. We have ourselves a dilemma in how we treat whistleblowers.”
The debate, which was organised by UCD’s Department of Philosophy and supported by President Michael D Higgins’s Ethics Initiative, was moderated by Mr Justice Colm Mac Eochaidh.
It also heard from Peter Dempsey, an Irish barrister currently being sued in England and France for unspecified disclosures he made at a firm he worked for.
Dr Kate Kenny, a sociologist from Queen’s University who studies whistle-blowing in the financial sector, supported Ms O’Keeffe’s theory on the reception of whistleblowers, saying they often exist in a fissure or a “non place”, somewhere between the “brave struggler” and the person who betrays loyalty. Many don’t wish to work with them.
Dr Daniele Santoro, a political philosopher at the University of Rome, also addressed the approximately 60 people in attendance.
