Vladimu Ceaucescu, editor of The Irish Times, woke with a start. He had had an appalling nightmare; he had dreamt that the Flood Tribunal was at an end. Lying on his bed, his lovely wife Ernest snoring beside him, he pinched himself to see whether he was awake or asleep. He was awake. The nightmare was over. He looked at his alarm clock. Six o'clock. In four hours' time, the Flood Tribunal would be convening again.
Its name came from the original judge, who one day had run amok with a chainsaw and was shot by members of the newly formed Royal Garda Constabulary. But by that time his inquiry had become the Mother of All Tribunals, after some shrewd observer had noted that one never saw Charles J. Haughey and James Gogarty in the same place at the same time.
And then one night, tired and emotional after a long day at the tribunal, Mr Haughey inadvertently went to bed still as Mr Gogarty, beside which the lovely Maureen woke up the next morning. There was no return: there could only be one tribunal, and Mr Moriarty, plucking hairs from his head and giggling, retired to his first love, cricket in Phoenix Park, while Mr Justice Flood found himself the master of two tribunals.
Refrigerator
But the enormity of the matter was only now unfolding. An investigation of Mr Raphael Burke indicated that at night he retired to a large refrigerator and there suspended himself from a rack until breakfast. A closer examination of marks on his buttocks revealed that he was in reality a consignment of beef bought into intervention in 1982, re-dated as beef for consumption in 1984, again re-dated in 1986, and sent for famine relief in Ethiopia. Rejected by starving peasants there, he was then recycled through a beef processing plant in Ravensdale for consumption in Moscow as offal for dog food. Where he was again rejected.
It proved necessary at this point to revive the beef tribunal too. When the presiding judge at the original tribunal, Mr Justice Hamilton, received this news, he commended himself to the spirits of his ancestors, ordered an Indian take-away and then impaled himself on his wig - an extremely honourable end known in the legal profession as hairy-curry.
The Hamilton funeral over, Mr Justice Flood then began the Mother of All Tribunals alone. Investigating officers examining a meat store near the Border found a bren-gun which proved to be part of a consignment of weapons which was smuggled into Ireland on orders of certain ministers back in 1970. There was no alternative: it was time to revive the Arms Trial.
Not everybody who could have been of assistance here was still alive; but one man, who had been a young volunteer in the IRA back in 1970, by now Chief Constable of the RUC, told of how, as a political leader in Belfast in 1994, he had walked into President Clinton's hotel room and found him in intimate congress with a side of beef which had been bought for intervention in 1981 and which turned out on closer examination to be Edith Cresson.
Cross-examination
Kenneth Starr at this point declined to be further involved in any investigations into President Clinton's private life. Mr Justice Flood was given responsibility for following up this lead, which took him right back through matters which Starr had reported on. It was his meticulous cross-examinations which revealed that Monica Lewinsky was in fact a Mullingar heifer; but the Cresson element necessarily obliged Mr Justice Flood to examine in detail the workings of the European Commission which had come so ignominiously crashing down back in March 1999.
The new millennium was well advanced. Mr Justice Flood found himself responsible for investigations into planning in north Co Dublin, payments to politicians, the beef industry, arms smuggling to the IRA, the financial and sexual affairs of the former President of the US, the collapse of the European Commission, payments to Padraig Flynn, and the sex life of Edith Cresson. The year was 2020. James Gogarty was still giving evidence . . .
Dublin Castle
Journalism in its normal sense had vanished. Newspaper editors would dispatch their newsroom staff down to Dublin Castle, there to talk to witnesses, counsel and solicitors, and to listen to allegations of how James Gogarty had slapped Padraig Flynn on the arm saying, "Thanks a lot, Big Fella." Edith Cresson was there with her dress, which she swore contained stains which could only have come from guns imported in the 1970 shipment. The newly appointed president of the European Commission, Monica Lewinsky, denied that her career in Europe had begun when she was bought into intervention.
When Mr Justice Flood started barking and reached for the old chainsaw, marks-persons from the newly formed RGC promptly shot him. He was replaced by Judge N'Derminge M'komo, who had begun his career as a junior in the early days of the Flood Tribunal. Journalists too spent their careers from apprenticeship through to retirement in the confines of the Mother of All Tribunals. All news now came through the legal profession.
Vladimu cuddled up to the manly form of his wife Ernest. Time for a brief snooze before another hard day at the tribunal.