Our View: Endless probes never seem to lead anywhere

After the public outcry over the police’s heavy-handed treatment of youngsters at a protest gathering two weeks ago, the attorney-general ordered an investigation. We suspect the main reason for having this investigation was to appease the angry public and limit the political attacks on the government for supposedly condoning anti-democratic behaviour by the police.

It is unclear what the investigation will do. Will it identify the officers that resorted to excessive force in dealing with demonstrators and recommend disciplinary action be taken against them? Will it try to find out who had decided the heavy police presence and who had ordered officers to be in riot gear? Or perhaps it will establish who had ordered the police to attack the demonstrators. The attorney-general opted for an independent investigation, because he could not trust the police to carry out an impartial probe.

Regardless of how well documented the findings are, it is far from certain that anyone will be disciplined, let alone charged. There was a criminal investigation into the long list of police failings in dealing with the case of the serial killer, but nobody has been charged so far. All that happened was that the number of policemen held responsible by the investigators was reduced from 23 to 13, while the attorney-general’s office is still considering whether to bring charges against any officer.

People could start thinking that these investigations are nothing more than a ploy to appease public opinion by creating the impression that the authorities have taken action to punish those responsible for wrongdoing or negligence. But as nobody is ever punished, people would inevitably start to view these investigations as a charade. It is not necessarily the case, as many of these can only apportion political, rather than criminal responsibility which are two very different things.

There could be another reason for the failure of many investigations. The people appointed to carrying out investigations might not know how to carry out a thorough probe or the state legal services might not know how to utilise the findings to successfully prosecute suspects. This appeared to have been the case with the investigation into the collapse of the economy in 2013. It went on for years, tens of millions of euro were spent and all the cases taken to court by the attorney-general were lost. It was failure on an epic scale, that may have been caused by investigators and prosecutors not being up to the job.

There are currently two probes in progress – the high-profile investigation into the citizenship scheme and another one into the Cypra slaughterhouse. The real interest is in the first, but whether it will shed any light on the matter and identify those who were abusing the system for personal gain, remains to be seen.