We knew, perceptionwise, the game was up for the Moriarty tribunal last September when Bank of Ireland . . . that most blue-chip of Irish blue-chip PLCs . . .

appointed Denis O'Brien as its new deputy governor. In appointing O'Brien to such a key position, the bank was sending out a clear signal that the tribunal's investigation into the circumstances under which O'Brien's consortium won the second mobile phone licence was irrelevant.

While it is important to stress that no evidence has ever been uncovered of any wrongdoing by O'Brien, the key question is: would such an appointment have been made in the days when the tribunals dominated the main evening news bulletins and when people queued daily to see James Gogarty's electrifying performances in the stand at the Flood tribunal?

Flood has since metamorphosised into Mahon and these days there are no queues and precious little electricity at either Moriarty or Mahon.

Monday should have been a big day for the Mahon tribunal. It emerged at the tribunal that the government chief whip, Tom Kitt, forgot to tell the tribunal about more than 3,000 in donations from landowner Christopher Jones. Green Party leader Trevor Sargent pointed out the money was equivalent to a deposit on a house back in the early 1990s.

Yet, the story only made it to pages seven and eight of the country's two main broadsheets the next day. The reason?

To put it bluntly, nobody really cares about the tribunals. The story was a two-day embarrassment for Tom Kitt. It hardly got a mention in the Dail (an intervention by Joe Higgins aside). There was no suggestion of any threat to his position. It won't affect him a jot in the upcoming general election and he is a strong candidate for the cabinet if Fianna Fail is returned to government. Maybe that is as it should be.

Kitt is widely respected in the Dail and the commonly held view in Leinster House is that he is a straight operator.

But it is difficult to believe that his forgetfulness wouldn't have attracted a much bigger fuss four or five years ago. For a whole variety of reasons . . . boredom being close to the top of the list . . . the general public have switched off and that is reflected in the level of coverage the tribunals now attract in our national media.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge that the tribunals have done the state some service. Their role in helping to clean up Irish public life is beyond question. Nobody can say that corruption isn't happening or will never happen again, but the whole culture has changed forever. Ironically, despite the negative perception of politics today, it is probably cleaner now than at any time in the past 40 years. Even taking account of the ludicrous sums of money paid out to barristers and solicitors at Dublin Castle, on balance, the tribunals have given us value for money.

But that doesn't mean they haven't outlived their usefulness. Tribunals have worked well in the past . . . McCracken being the most obvious example . . . but only when there are extremely narrow terms of reference. Manifestly that has not been the case with Mahon/Flood.

And it seems beyond argument that a tribunal has not been the best way to look at the awarding of the second mobile phone licence. It's hard also not to sympathise with the frustrations of Denis O'Brien. He has had to deal with the tribunal for the past five years. In that time the Moriarty tribunal has made no finding against him and many believe it never will do so. And even in the cases of Michael Lowry and Charles Haughey, it's worth recalling Gladstone's line about justice delayed being justice denied. Haughey is now old and unwell, while it's almost a decade since Lowry was forced to resign from the cabinet.

Despite their obvious flaws, the reality is that we're stuck with the tribunals for the medium term anyway. Although privately politicians might criticise them, politically they are still untouchable. Even the highly populist efforts by the government to reduce the amounts being paid to tribunal lawyers had to be put on the long finger, for fear it would undermine the current investigations.

But the next time we hear a politician give a knee-jerk reaction to some big issue of the day by calling for a tribunal of inquiry to be set up, we should avoid the temptation to jump on the bandwagon. If the eight-and-a-half years since the establishment of the Flood and Moriarty tribunals have taught us anything, it's that there has to be a better way.