They got around to almost suggesting that Charles Haughey was responsible for the Iran-Iraq war in the third of the television documentary series on Desmond O'Malley on Sunday night. This is hardly surprising, since, in the first of the series, through heavy-handed linkages of images, they suggested Haughey had been personally to blame for mass slaughter in Northern Ireland.
They glided quickly over O'Malley's role in the economically calamitous strategy from 1977 to 1979 and failed to acknowledge the scale of George Colley's ineptitude as Minister for Finance. That latter record had to be blurred, for it would have interfered with the thesis that Haughey secured the leadership of Fianna Fail through a combination of intimidation and bribery. O'Malley quoted himself last Sunday week as challenging the late Tom McEllistrim, one of Haughey's staunchest supporters, about where Haughey got his wealth from. The way he told it, he (O'Malley) was being very daring indeed. But why did he not challenge Haughey himself about it; how was it that only now does he get around to mentioning it?
Come to think of it, among the questions that should be bothering a lot of us is where the Progressive Democrats got its money from, especially in the early years up to and including the 1987 general election? It did not occur to the programme-makers to ask about that. The bit about corruption and Haughey was a little hilarious on Sunday night.
BARRY Desmond was shown unselfconsciously going on about golden circles. It was one sweet golden circle that secured him the plum job on the EU Court of Auditors, for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. There was an unwitting hilarity about Sunday night's programme and it concerned Maire GeogheganQuinn. She made a few cameo appearances to convey outrage about Haughey for one reason and another. The hilarity arose from the clip of the 1986 Fianna Fail ardfheis which caught her lepping to her feet to signal the standing ovation at the conclusion of Haughey's address. Then, it showed her dancing on the stage, holding hands with Padraig Flynn or someone, to the strains of Rise and Follow Charlie. The same woman, by the way, did very well indeed from another golden circle when she got the plum job on the EU Court of Auditors.
In the first programme it was asserted that the IRA attempted to take Des O'Malley's life. This arose from O'Malley's story of the gardai coming around one morning to a flat he stayed in and telling him they thought there was a mounted rifle pointing into the flat from a house on the opposite side of the road. Now I have no doubt that the gardai did tell O'Malley that, since he said they did, but wouldn't you have thought any serious journalist would have attempted to discover whether what the gardai told O'Malley that morning was true? Would they not have wondered what the gardai did about the mounted rifle and about the people in the house where the rifle was located?
THE series is a disgrace and Desmond O'Malley may regret his participation in it, for he is better than the figure the series presents him as. His defence to the allegation that he was involved in the "doctoring" of the statement of Col Hefferon for the Arms Trial hardly does him justice either. The late Mr Justice Brian Walsh gave me a piece of advice once: never mix bad arguments with good arguments. If you have just one good point, that will do; don't supplement it with lots of bad points.
It is not believable that Des O'Malley doctored, or had doctored, Col Hefferon's statement, because he would have run a grave risk in doing so to no point whatsoever. All the stuff about other statements being changed as well is irrelevant. Anyway, the issue here is that the kernel of Col Hefferon's statement was changed, unlike the changes to the other statements. There would have been no point in doctoring the statements because it could not have affected the decision of the District Justice in sending the case forward for trial at the depositions stage.
Furthermore, it would have made, and did make, no difference to the evidence that Col Hefferon was going to give in court. And finally, it ran the risk of scuttling the whole case - for the discovery of a statement so crucially doctored could have led to the trial being aborted.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie