Before the publication yesterday of Mr Justice McCracken's report, the gap between what the public knew and what it was being told was growing ever wider. Even after each of the previous two tribunal reports - of inquiries into the beef industry and the hepatitis C scandal - there was a vague sense that something remained unsaid.
Facts had been found. Hidden truths had been revealed. But somewhere in the muted, technical language of scrupulous legal reports, something seemed to have gone missing: what those facts meant to ordinary citizens, how they related to the basic values of Irish people.
This time, there is no such gap. Mr Justice McCracken's report is rigorous, factual, carefully judged. But it is also marked by an overriding sense of how things look to the members of the public. If it has its eyes focused on the bizarre parallel universe of offshore accounts and coded banking transactions, it also has its feet firmly planted on the street. It has the feel not so much of being a report to the State, as of being an account rendered to the Irish people.
At one level, therefore, the report is very grim reading. It shows that the central figure in modern Irish politics has been a kept man, a brazen liar and a cynical hypocrite. It shows that in each of the State's two main parties there was at least one powerful figure unworthy of public office. It shows the Dail was utterly misled (by Mr Michael Lowry) and the Revenue Commissioners were deprived of important information. For the second time in three years (Dunnes Stores following Goodman International), a tribunal of inquiry has found that a major indigenous Irish company knowingly colluded in the evasion of taxes by making under-the-counter payments to employees.
But at another level, the report itself suggests that Irish public life can be much better than this if it expresses the values that are sometimes dismissed as common sense. Never for a moment does the judge allow his long immersion in the world of politicians, business people and bankers to distract him from the kind of judgements that ordinary citizens might make.
He knows a "lavish lifestyle" when he sees it. He knows right from wrong, and puts that knowledge to brilliant use. He can distinguish the credible from the incredible and refuses to ask the public to accept the unbelievable. And he is willing to use the words that ordinary citizens might use to describe the behaviour of Mr Lowry and Mr Haughey: "unacceptable, a sham, cynical, appalling, bizarre, untrue."
Thus, almost as significant as his findings of fact, is the judge's refusal to believe the sworn evidence of three prominent individuals. Bringing to bear not just a forensic mind, but the common sense of any intelligent citizen, he refuses to be fooled by contrived explanations. He does not believe Mr Lowry's evidence that a number of payments he received from Dunnes Stores were for personal consultancy work. He does not accept Mr Ciaran Haughey's sworn evidence that a payment of £10,000 from Mr Ben Dunne was for consultancy services.
And, of course, he finds that on 11 different matters, having sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Mr Charles Haughey gave evidence that was "unacceptable and untrue". Around the careful and devastating analysis of Mr Haughey's statements on oath, Mr Justice McCracken places an unwritten, but plainly discernible command: Come off it!
He does not believe Mr Haughey spent huge sums of money without wondering where they were coming from. He does not credit the notion that Mr Haughey could have forgotten Mr Dunne personally handing him three drafts for £70,000 sterling each. He doesn't buy the central contention of Mr Haughey's evidence, that a dead man, Mr Des Traynor, was the only man who could tell tales. And the implications of this frank disbelief are huge. For one thing, it implies that Mr Haughey has been prepared to lie under oath, and that his evidence to, for instance, the beef tribunal has to be looked at with a new scepticism. And for another it implies that for many years, Mr Haughey was fully aware he had financial obligations to wealthy individuals while he was in office. If he knew he was getting money from Mr Dunne, then he presumably knew where the rest of the money was coming from. And if that is the case, then he can tell the public what he knows - either voluntarily or under compulsion from a new tribunal.
On the question of a new tribunal, the report rightly refrains from telling the Oireachtas where its duty lies. But the judge makes a finding that creates its own imperative. He finds that Mr Haughey's "whole lifestyle" was dependent on the receipt of substantial gifts from business people. He says he was "in a position of dependency" in relation to these wealthy individuals. And he notes that if such a situation were permissible "the potential for bribery and corruption would be enormous".
This in Mr Haughey's case, is precisely the possibility that has now arisen. Occupying the pinnacle of Irish democracy, he regarded huge payments to himself as not merely permissible but, as his evidence to the tribunal suggested, a natural occurrence. At the very least, the McCracken report makes clear, there was a potential during his period of office for corruption on an "enormous" scale. It also suggests, significantly, that copies of some of the Ansbacher Cayman Island files still exist. There is, in so many words, an invitation to look further. The judge's acute perception of the meaning of public accountability also shapes the understanding of political corruption that runs through the report. He is not content to adopt a narrowly legalistic formula that holds that corruption exists only where specific services are rendered in return for money. He in fact finds no evidence of such favours on the part of either Mr Haughey or Mr Lowry.
But he does not stop there. He sees corruption as including two other possibilities. One is the vague, but powerful, hold that a person who has secretly given large amounts of money retains over the recipient. And the other is the corruption of democracy itself by the perception that those who make the law are willing to break it.
Surrounding his findings is a clear sense that a functioning democracy is much more than the absence of naked graft. Equally clear in those findings is a sense that the damage cannot be undone unless powerful lawbreakers are seen to be brought to justice.
Mr Justice McCracken has done as much as anyone could to show there are alternatives to the unhinged democracy that Irish citizens have been saddled with.