Justice delayed is justice denied

A little while ago, in a post since eaten by our inability to get blogger to properly archive old posts, we had noted the extremely sloppy investigative techniques of the Irish Republic's police force in the 1970s, which had hindered a thorough investigation of bombings in Dublin and Monaghan that may have involved elements of the British security forces. We'll refer you to the Shamrockshire Eagle for more details on the latest twists in that investigation, but one lingering question for us was whether the investigation of a similar event today would be just as sloppy. We fear that it would.

Now this is not a directly comparable incident, but the way that the police are approaching the investigation of a tragic bus accident in Dublin gives us cause for concern. The accident details have filled the pages of the Irish papers since it happened on Saturday and the outline of what happened is simple and depressing: one city bus with no passengers ploughed into a line of people boarding the 66 bus to Maynooth, killing 5 and injuring 3 times as many. But from this Irish Times report, we learn that 3 days later, the police had yet to interview the driver of either bus.

Maybe we've watched too many Law and Order episodes, in which such a gap would be viewed as a disastrous error, giving the interviewees time to cook up a story. And this is presumably not a criminal investigation. But...
But 5 people are dead. Some severe individual or corporate negligence might be involved. The delay in the interviews is rationalised by the emotional state of the drivers --

Crash investigators attached to both the garda and Dublin Bus investigations are anxious to speak to the drivers. The bus company said yesterday the "level of distress and coherency are issues which are still being addressed by specialist counsellors".

But how about the emotional state of the victims? And given the inevitable feelings of guilt and responsibility, even with the best will in the world the mind can play tricks with memories of what happened as each day passes. The public have been assured that the best international experts will be brought in to figure out what happened. We suspect it will take those experts about two seconds -- someone had their foot on the accelerator when they thought they had it on the brake.

The experts would then move to secondary responsibility issues: are the pedals on the bus too close? was the bus-stop poorly designed in exposing boarding passengers to this risk (many preliminary indications say that it was). However, with the investigative delay, there is time for other explanations to emerge. Freak explanations of course, but ones that could still find a constituency. The people promulgating them might genuinely believe them (the bus just lurched forward, I never touched anything).

And the Republic being what it is, a good story is just one step removed from a media appearance, a pressure group, and a multi-year tribunal of inquiry. A contemporaneous interview with the principals would provide a baseline to judge any subsequent interpretations of the events. But now we don't have it. In this day and age, the job description of the Irish police should involve more than saying "what's going on, lads" to the local bowsies. The classic Law and Order interview strategy involves Mr Nasty and Mr Nice. There seems to be times when the Garda's Mr Nasty goes AWOL.