Hard truths about honesty

We think we celebrate whistleblowers – until we hear the whistle being blown on our own team

‘Whistleblower” is what George Orwell called a “dying metaphor”. A good metaphor “assists thought by evoking a visual image”, he wrote - but the visual image evoked by the term whistleblower is a deeply ambivalent one, at odds with the cuddly connotations of virtue the phrase carries today.

Senior counsel Seán Guerin captured that image in his 2014 report to the government on the allegations made by Sergeant Maurice McCabe: “The whistleblower, like ...