There has, almost from the beginning, been a strange dimension of inevitability about the tribunal pursuit of Bertie Ahern, writes John Waters.
On the surface, everything was to play for in a clash between the forces of rectitude and the culture of semi-constitutionality. But, as in a Hollywood movie, the ending was a foregone conclusion: the Good Guy would win.
We knew it from the beginning, but on Thursday last, mysteriously, it became crystal clear. It is a strange experience for Fianna Fáil to find one of its number playing the Good Guy, but there it is. Something has shifted in the psyche of the nation, and Bertie has become its most visible totem.
At the back of tribunal culture is a fantasy of journalists and the Irish middle-class. Who can deny that Irish journalism, including the most debased of our tabloid journalism, is an exclusively middle-class creation? We have neither a genuinely populist media capable of shifting the hearts and minds of the hoi polloi, nor an intellectual media with the capacity to challenge the educated classes. Generally our media regurgitate middle-class prejudice in the form of cliché, hypocrisy and spite. Most Irish newspapers can be read in about 10 minutes, as they rarely do more than issue reassurances that the moral universe has not changed overnight.
The tribunals represent one of the core "ideas" of the half-century of political journalism now coming to an end: the "idea" that corruption is everywhere under our noses if only we could establish a paper trail. This idea stems substantially from Watergate, from a journalistic fantasy of taking out the president, but it also feeds off a specifically Irish middle-class prejudice about Fianna Fáil, which, having its roots in the countryside, has always engendered suspicion among the urban middle-classes. And so, in part because of the prejudices of their beginnings, and partly driven by the mythology of their profession, Irish journalists have dreamed of uncovering a cesspit of FF corruption, thereby vindicating their essentially leftist sensibilities and putting their own names up in lights.
Alas, it has come to very little. After a decade of vastly expensive tribunals, we have discovered what? That Ray Burke was dodgy? That Charlie Haughey was able to induce intelligent and successful businessmen to give him their money? This was the only real news to emerge from the tribunals, and its power derives not from the investigative capacities of either the journalistic or legal professions, but from the exuberant effrontery of the man in the dock. Notwithstanding the colour and sensationalism of the revelations about him, not a shred of substance was found to confirm that Haughey had taken money in return for favours. The middle classes were predictably indignant, but the real message was that we're not, as a culture, particularly adept at corruption.
Unfortunately, Haughey has given our less imaginative elements an undeserved sense of vindication, in much the way that Joyce single-handedly acquired us a literary reputation.
The majority of Irish people sense that Bertie is relatively clean. It's not so much that we think him whiter-than-white, but that he reminds us of ourselves in ways that we can't quite articulate. He is, in other words, a shambles. For lawyers and journalists, reared on the fantasy of forensic deconstructions, the inconsistencies in his story represent exciting possibilities of a breakthrough. But for most of us, such dissonance is evidence of the mess most of us recognise as normality.
To say nothing of the more intimate details concerning his marriage breakdown and personal relationships, the very way Bertie describes the workings of his finances makes sense to those of us who struggle to bring the ends of our means together every month.
The idea that someone would be able to recall the precise details of a particular lodgement over a decade before may make sense to a member of the legal profession, who gets an erection, or its equivalent, by dint of mere proximity to a bank, but for most of us it seems a preposterous notion.
Last Thursday was a critical day, when the moral force of the tribunals waned for perhaps the last time. It's hard to say what, but something snapped m'lud, perhaps an envelope pushed too far or one straw too many brought down on the camel's weary back. Bertie sensed it and was overcome with relief. But, on the outside, we sensed it too. The charade had run its course. It was time to put the wigs back in mothballs.
For more than a decade, most of us have acquiesced in this outrageous breach of the most fundamental principles of justice and jurisprudence, We did so for two slightly conflicting reasons: we were in part seduced by the Watergate fantasy and in part fearful that, by objecting, we might lead to questions about our own ethical outlook and behaviour. Most of us, in the depths of our hearts, knew that, if a tribunal came knocking, we wouldn't be able to explain anything - not because we had done something illegal but because most of our lives are in an even bigger mess than Bertie's.