Kevin Myers: There are certain things you don't expect in life, ever: a group of Salvation Army types kicking a wino to death, say, or the Pope making out with Billy Graham in Brown Thomas's shop-window.
So when something so against the natural order of things does occur, it's deeply unnerving. Let me start close to home first, with the death of Captain James Kelly, whom the obituary in this newspaper described as an Irish Captain Dreyfus. The Irish Times said this, not An Phoblacht.
Whatever he was, he was not an Irish Dreyfus. Dreyfus was innocent. Totally and utterly innocent. Captain James Kelly was guilty of assisting in the supply of arms to the IRA. He was also active in the creation of the Provisional IRA, as were certain members of the Fianna Fáil government at the time. In arming a group he knew was in disloyal opposition to the lawful government of the Republic, and to the Constitution, and the President, he was disobeying his oath of allegiance.
There is one minor issue: did he receive orders so to do? Did anyone in lawful authority over him tell him to supply arms unlawfully to the IRA? Well, as we know, there are different opinions on that, and happily I hold none of them. I don't know whether or not Jack Lynch authorised the government sub-committee on the North to make free with government funds in the purchase of weapons for "defence groups" in Belfast and Derry. Nor does it matter greatly. For if Captain Kelly received orders to assist in the illegal importation of guns for supply to the IRA, he was himself breaking the law. And we know from Nuremberg about the moral and legal validity of a soldier claiming that he was only obeying orders.
Moreover, we know about the longer-term consequences of his republican manoeuvring: 25 years of war. And though some might consider him unfortunate that his career went nowhere as a direct consequence of the Arms Trial, he wasn't framed as Dreyfus was, nor imprisoned as Dreyfus was, nor deported to the hell of Devil's Island, as Dreyfus was. Ha. He wasn't even found guilty. And unlike 3,500 other people, he wasn't killed. In fact, the only comparison between Alfred Dreyfus and James Kelly was their military rank. He could just as easily have been called the Republic's answer to Captain Terence O'Neill.
One of his co-accused was Charles Haughey, whom people have, almost surreally, been falling over to vindicate in recent days, and acclaim as the author of our past dozen years of growth. And Lord, such people, ones who really should know better, such as Michael O'Leary and Charlie McCreevy.
Haughey could be hailed as the man behind the boom of the 1990s in a way that the man who has been beating his wife for years and who is finally forced at gunpoint to drive her to hospital may be said to have saved her life. For as Charlie McCreevy knows better than most, Haughey debauched the economy from the time he came to power in 1979. Indeed, one of the few enterprises which profited under his leadership was industrial scale corruption and tax evasion, of which he was the prime exemplar. Thus the taxpayer was robbed twice over: at the time of the initial theft, and later, when we were obliged to pay for the tribunals into the initial thefts.
He regarded the assets of the State as a cake to be carved and distributed: cargo-cult economics. He was good at giving things away - toothbrushes, and free travel passes to pensioners, and tax-exemptions to "artists" and, most scandalously of all, to the bloodstock industry, of which of course he was part. Payback time was to be seen in the annual sales at Goffs, where stud-farms queued up to pay vast sums for Haughey horses: Pal on hooves.
His custodianship of the economy was catastrophic. He borrowed to finance current expenditure, apparently believing that he could extend to the entire state the extraordinary immunity to consequence which now governed his own life. He thus turned this country into a comic turn. When Poles, made miserable by the dreary incompetence of communism, wanted their sense of humour tickled they'd come here, gaze around for a day or so at this sad nightmare, "Ireland", and then return home wiping tears of mirth from their cheeks.
Haughey's much-lauded reforms of the late 1980s occurred only after the International Monetary Fund threatened to appoint inspectors to run the economy. What an achievement: a struggle for independence lasting the best part of a century, all nearly undone in a few short years of Haughey's brutal ineptitude and sordid corruption.
So is the bliss of imminent nuptiality making Michael O'Leary's brain soft when he too praises Haughey? For Haughey was a classic statist, who revelled in possessing semi-state companies which he protected against all competition. It wasn't Haughey who finally broke the crippling Aer Lingus stranglehold on the Irish aviation market, but Garret FitzGerald.
What about his Financial Services Centre? Well, firstly, the centre didn't cause the Irish economic boom, but blossomed with it. Moreover, the centre was classical economic Haugheyism: it was yet another tax-free wheeze. But societies need taxes; and the taxes not being paid by the extraordinarily affluent financial services sector still had to be paid by someone else in the economy. And that's where us, Suckers Inc. - the PAYE sector, whom Haughey raped repeatedly during his years in office - dug deep again, as always. We might be pathetic dupes; but at least we remember who it was who duped us.