It's always been dead easy to get a TV studio to applaud by making some crack about politicians. As a group. As a type. In recent times, the legal profession has been running politicians a close second when it comes to triggering easy but heartfelt contemptuous hand-claps.
As a group, as a type, the legal profession is seen as commanding outrageous fees, much of the money coming out of taxpayers' pockets, to achieve no great benefit to anybody in particular.
Lawyers overseas are used to this. But it's relatively new here. Hence the number of solicitors and barristers I've heard recently commenting that only a very few lawyers command mega-fees like those reported, and asking why everybody assumes that what's true of the minority applies to the rest. Relax folks, I'm here to tell you that it's a rule of despised (as opposed to endangered) species: the worst traits or practices of a single member of that species will be indiscriminately applied to the whole species.
There's a corollary, too. When an exceptionally fine member of the species does an exceptionally fine job, none of the credit accruing will be applied to the rest of the species. So if a politician does a fine or even heroic thing, that just proves how exceptional that politician is, whereas if a politician is found to have taken kickbacks or bribes, well, we always knew they were all at it, didn't we?
Just as it's not fair to politicians that credit never gets spread around, so it's not fair to the legal profession that the splendid job done by Mr Justice McCracken and his tribunal will not boost the image of the legal profession generally. On the other hand, it is important that an exception and a precedent-setter be recognised as such, and McCracken is clearly both.
It says volumes about most of the tribunals we've had that when this one got under way expectations were low. There was a feeling of deja vu, a weary instinct to shrug and dismiss tribunals as a way of eating up taxpayers' money without any end result.
As a nation we started off watching the beef tribunal with excitement and curiosity. Then we watched the performances, discussing how embarrassing X had been and how - you had to hand it to him - Y had performed with great style. Towards the end we became bored, confused by irrelevant detail, the drama and the potential for a guilty/not guilty decision gone. All was diffused into a fog.
If you could make a fog out of green hearts, under-the-table payments and export credit insurance, then possibly a fog could also have been made out of payments to politicians. That did not happen, and there can be no doubt that Mr Justice McCracken's approach and method was the key reason. Just as Mary Robinson has redefined the Presidency for whoever succeeds her, so Mr Justice McCracken has redefined tribunals of inquiry from now on.
Certainly, he reduced the theatrics by structuring the process so as to minimise the benefit of traditional adversarial interrogation. At the time, some thought this looked like weakness. People were "being let off the hook". In retrospect it was the subordination of performance to process. To use a sporting analogy, McCracken was not interested in the elegance of the swing, he was interested in where the ball went.
He also varied the tempo. When it came to demanding data and putting bodies on planes to the Cayman Islands, he moved fast enough to leave skid marks. Yet when it came to the bizarre episode of the man who sent letters to himself, the pace slowed to such a crawl there were real fears it would allow escapes. In the event, there were no escapes and no diffusion.
At its conclusion there was a deep national satisfaction, carrying with it an advance absolution: if the report wasn't that good, the tribunal had been of enormous value. Then came the report, with its unequivocal references to the DPP and its most admirable clarity, which has left no leeway for anybody to put a spin on the issues. More bluntly, there can be no debate on foot of this report as to who is vindicated or not vindicated.
Although there is no rigid template for an ensuing tribunal, much should be emulated, including the clarity, (which must start with the terms of reference), the speed and the focus. That speed and focus must meet, and show signs of being met by the Government. A second tribunal can only work if all the political leaders and parties can agree the terms of reference - and quickly. Those terms should be narrow enough to maintain the admirable focus of the first tribunal, but not so narrow as to miss something major.
But if McCracken has upped the ante for any later tribunal, it's worth, in that context, pointing to a recurring irritant of the last one. This was the number of individuals - donors and recipients, business people and politicians - who kept singing the "no favours asked or given" song.
The fact that it was sung so loudly and so confidently betokens, to me, that those giving very large and inappropriate sums of money to individual politicians (and sometimes to political parties) are pretty sure that they've left no paper trails of favours asked and granted. It was a paper trail through the world's banks that nailed the man Margaret Heffernan couldn't personally nail.
Lack of a paper trail of favours asked, in my view, will not prove that favours were not done in other cases. If you give someone a tenner and you subsequently want a favour done, you go and ask them for the favour. If you give someone £20,000 you don't even have to go and ask for the favour - you have put the equivalent of an electronic prompter in their head. When they see an issue coming up, be it related to planning or to laws likely to affect the way your business works, they will approach that issue with an unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged realisation of its relevance to you.
Out here in the real world, if A gives B money, A gets something back, even if it's only a little round badge to stick on a lapel indicating that A gave money to a particular charity. In the political world, money buys acquaintanceship, if not friendship. It buys attention. It buys access.
Lots of other things buy access as well, of course - fame, for one. Sinead O'Connor may get to see the Taoiseach when there is a protest outside Leinster House where an anonymous woman of the same age would not.
However, it is the purchase of access by money which, in my view, is most subversive of democracy. It's a financial gloss on Orwell's line: all animals are equal, but pigs are more equal than others. All voters are equal, but a voter with £20,000 gets more access than a voter with 20p.
Access is what matters. Get the right person in front of an influential politician and the end result may be a change in the law of the land. One mother who talked to me when I was Minister for Justice achieved precisely that. But she didn't pay to see me. And that's another point worth making. Just as the person who gives big bucks to a politician never has to actually articulate what they want done, never has to leave a paper trail of requests, so there is no statute of limitations on the value of the money given. It's a cross between an insurance policy and a lottery ticket. You give me £20,000 now, and who knows, in nine or 10 years, I may be minister with a portfolio relevant to your business, and won't you be laughing all the way to the offshore bank, knowing that I have to be positively disposed towards you.
I sincerely hope the next tribunal follows McCracken's splendid example - that it follows trails, examines decisions and names names. But it would be unrealistic to expect it to turn up contracts between donors and recipients for favours asked and given. Nudges, winks and knowing inflections are difficult to get on the record.
Although, emboldened by the McCracken tribunal, one lives in hope.