DUBLIN: Enda Kenny, Ireland’s prime minister since 2011, leads a minority government that has become increasingly unstable and only narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence last week over its handling of a policing scandal.

Kenny has already said he won’t be contesting the next election, and he is likely to step aside from leading the government after an annual trip to Washington for a meeting with the US president to mark St. Patrick’s Day on March 17.

Kenny’s career has been undone by a convoluted police scandal that has dragged on for more than a decade.

The scandal has been compared to the case of Frank Serpico, the detective whose testimony in the 1970s brought to light corruption in the New York Police Department.

The matter dates to 2006, when an officer began raising concerns about low-level misconduct within the National Police Service.

The officer, Sgt. Maurice McCabe, quickly found himself shunned by his fellow officers. But he persisted, exposing what he said was a practice of deleting penalty points incurred by drivers for minor traffic violations. Eventually, a government inquiry found in his favour.

Case of clerical error

But the case won’t go away. Last week, the Irish Examiner and public broadcaster RTE’s Prime Time programme reported that Ireland’s child protection agency had created a file on McCabe containing a false accusation of child sexual abuse — something that the agency has attributed to what it called a clerical error. The news organisations also reported that this wasn’t the first time McCabe had been wrongly accused of such a crime; an earlier complaint against him had been made, in 2006, and dismissed.

The disclosure that a whistle-blower could face such accusations in apparent retaliation has raised unsettling questions about Ireland’s culture of policing and the possible collusion of other agencies, including the child protection agency.

The case has affected the highest levels of the Irish government, bedevilling Kenny. He has been attacked by critics who charge that he missed opportunities to resolve the mess in 2014 and supported the police chief at the time and his justice minister for too long.

Kenny failed at first to give a complete account of when he learnt of the false abuse allegations and has insisted that he knew nothing of a broader smear campaign — an assertion that his critics in Parliament have contested.

There were heated exchanges between Kenny and Gerry Adams, the leader of the opposition Sinn Fein party. At one point, Kenny called Adams an “absolute hypocrite” and attacked him for playing down, years earlier, the case of a former Sinn Fein member who said she was sexually abused by IRA members — a charge that Adams denies.

Vow to probe

Kenny has pledged a new official inquiry into the latest developments in the McCabe case.

Two weeks ago he survived a no-confidence motion put forward by Sinn Fein. Both Kenny’s party, Fine Gael, and its coalition partner, Fianna Fail, had little appetite for fresh elections that could unsettle their fragile government. Before the vote, Kenny apologised in Parliament to McCabe. He called the allegations against him “appalling.”

“He and his family deserve the truth, as do all against whom allegations have been made,” Kenny said. “And I therefore offer a full apology to Maurice McCabe and his family for the treatment handed out to them as exposed in recent programmes.”

McCabe, and his wife, Lorraine, said in a statement that they had been victims of a “long and sustained campaign to destroy our characters.”

They added: “We have endured eight years of great suffering, private nightmare, public defamation and state vilification arising solely,” they said, from McCabe’s determination to ensure that the police agency “adheres to decent and appropriate standards of policing in its dealings with the Irish people.”

Out of office

McCabe, 55, a father of five from County Westmeath in the centre of the country, has been on sick leave since last year.

The McCabe case has exposed the secretive and insular nature of the police service. An internal investigation into McCabe’s complaints found no evidence of corruption but concluded that some officers had failed to follow procedures. But a police chief, Martin Callinan, stunned the country when he told lawmakers in 2014 that whistle-blowers like McCabe were “disgusting.” (He later took early retirement.)

In 2014, the justice minister, Alan Shatter, resigned after a report commissioned by the government found that the government and the police had failed to address McCabe’s allegations adequately.

Now, the case is about to get yet another look. Kenny has promised to investigate whether a smear campaign targeted McCabe.

— New York Times News Service