Heather Humphreys

[gentle music] Cover-ups, Garda corruption, and secrets and scandals that rocked the Irish state have been brought together in a new book by one of the country's top investigative journalists.

Frank Connolly broke story after story that led to tribunals, inquiries, and exposed a culture of bribery, fraud, and the abuse of power in Ireland.

Today, he's talking to me about his new book, Exposed: Scandals That Rocked the Irish State.

Um, we're discussing your new book, Exposed: Scandals That Rocked the Irish State.

What a trip, in a way, down memory lane, but I mean, reading some of the stuff, I find it hard to believe this happened in our lifetimes.

Um, in particular, bring us to Donegal, and I suppose start by telling us about the spring of '99 when you got a tip-off from, I think it was a Dublin solicitor or something, to g- to go and investigate something that was going on up there.

Yeah, I, I'm, at the time, I was in the midst of, of doing all of the, uh, political investigations into corruption that led to the, the, you know, the Flood and the Mahon Tribunal.

But in, in, uh, early '99, this solicitor told me that he had a case involving a family in Donegal who'd been accused of complicity in a, in a murder, wrongly accused, he said.

And you're right.

You can go from me to Heather Humphreys to David Maxwell, who's in the Dáil at the moment, John Condennan, Ivan Yates, Seymour Crawford, the Dockerels.

Generally, a lot of Protestants have gone and run for Fine Gael, but equally Trevor Sargent was the leader of the Green Party, Ned Cannon, Trevor Sargent, John O'Sullivan in the Labour Party in Limerick.

And there was one councillor, Trevor Matthews, in Dundrum.

This level of sectarianism isn't acceptable, just like racism isn't acceptable, just like the creeping anti-migrant undertone isn't acceptable.

But doubly and triply, if you actually believe in a united Ireland, an Ireland for all, You have a duty to show, don't give those who are opposed to unity the free reign that we couldn't accept that.

Look how they treat Heather Humphreys.

We couldn't accept that.

It was the presidential election last year.

We had Jim Gavin and Captain Connolly and Heather Humphreys going around the planet.

Before that, we had the general election the year before.

And the farmer organisations had elections, the IFA and the ICMSA in particular.

OK, Clare, I mean, I suppose people have talked in the past of first unite the people and then maybe think about the constitutional issues later.

I mean, we had a dry run during the presidential election where Heather Humphreys was, I suppose, being put out there as a living example of somebody whose family had a loyalist Ireland background.

And within a kind of a generation, you had a pro-United Ireland person in the form of Heather Humphreys.

And yet...

there seemed to be an attempt during the campaign to somehow highlight her orange ancestry as a kind of a drawback rather than a benefit.

But I think what I was, in a way... talking about was kind of why whether in that in the context of the kind of tradition of um keeping the head down there's actually an onus on leaders of that community to begin to have a public conversation in a careful way that um That is risky in some respects because it means that they're needing to begin to talk about things that may well be divisive and that could well be misconstrued either willfully or unintentionally by people on hearing them about history, about politics, about the social position of society.

But in the absence of that, and it's very interesting in Heather Humphrey's discussion, and I think her recent interview in the Belfast Telegraph is fascinating on this, there's a sense that this just hasn't been undertaken well.

If you don't do that, and if you don't have leaders who help begin those conversations, then the alternative is kind of the surreptitiousness that we've talked about a few times, and potentially the continued misunderstanding.

So it's not necessarily, as I say, in the long term, a route to a more integrated and healthy intercommunal set of relations.