Nobody wants to go for the test . . . especially nobody who has a car with this or that wrong with it that they're hoping to hide. Because they don't want to do the test, they grumble incessantly about it and develop strong antipathies to the men who carry it out. Even apres-test, when they've got their certificates and can breathe easy for another couple of years, they haven't a good word to say about it. The testing machines are always defective or the testing guy didn't operate them properly or they test absurd aspects of cars anyway.

Yet it must be the case that the national stock of cars is in better shape than it would be if there was no test. I can generalise from myself. I was always perfectly happy with a banger as long as it moved. I'd never have got anything fixed, much less checked on a car of mine if it weren't that I'm afraid of failing the test. Against my will, therefore, I've had to improve. Most reluctantly, I've become a better citizen than I was. You can see how my train of thought led me to Michael McDowell and the effect he has had on us.

There has always been somebody around to get up the noses of the average, slap-youon-the-back, charming, bent, amoral, devout Catholic, two-faced, kindhearted backbencher.

Such men . . . and they come in a female version, too, consider themselves to be, and arguably are, the very pattern of Irishness. They do not want people to be other than they are. Above all, they do not want other people to be righteous.

They can put up with anything except righteousness. The merest whiff of moral superiority drives them insane.

Not only is righteousness a reproach of a moral kind . . . it is a reproach of a class kind. There has always been somebody in the Dail who quite plainly never did and never will get roaring drunk after a dynamic Comhairle Cheanntair meeting where all his plots and stratagems worked out and woke up on a banquette in the back bar of a hotel beside the dishevelled form of the wife of the local vet. Such a man, if he rises to power, will attract the kind of sullen criticism which until recently was copiously levelled at McDowell, day after day. It has stopped for the moment only because they're all in some trouble, though he's in most trouble, about not foreseeing that the Supreme Court would find the law on statutory rape unconstitutional. He also must seem to his fellow-politicians to have made a fool of himself by mishandling what appears to be a power struggle with Mary Harney. Any of them would have done whatever he did, of course.

But with real professionals, nobody sees the knife leaving his hand for her back.

Maybe his gaffe will lessen their hostility.

After all, what they have against men who are not good sports is that they don't risk themselves . . . they don't join the human race by showing that they are as weak as the next person. In recent times there have been at least two men in the Dail who were allowed to be scathingly morally righteous and were not personally hated mainly because they had drink problems. Michael McDowell belongs to the upper bourgeoisie and sounds it: he was a denizen of the Law Library where even the Fianna Failers behave like Fine Gaelers and in fact he was a Fine Gaeler; his grandfather called off the Rising, supported the Treaty and worked on the commission that fixed the border with Northern Ireland; and he doesn't have a drink problem. It's a wonder anyone even says hello to him.

I'm not all that enamoured of him, myself.

I think he behaved disgracefully in the matter of the Centre for Public Inquiry. I don't think a government minister should execute his will by means of leaks to Sam Smyth.

Indeed, the way McDowell got rid of an extrapolitical power centre by shafting Frank Connolly shows the need for an extra-political power centre.

But within his justice brief, McDowell has taken on very difficult and very important reforms. There is a nasty nexus involving the gardai, the private security industry where gardai moonlight, and the drinks industry which hires moonlighting gardai to oversee the places where the young get drunk.

McDowell has tackled parts of all those sectors. He's got the foot of a Garda Reserve in the Garda door. The prison officers don't seem to be quite the independent republic they once were. You could say he hasn't been as successful a reformer as a more quiet and efficient person would have been. But which efficient person tried? Doesn't it take someone with the self-confidence conferred by every privilege Ireland has to offer to take on certain vested interests? Doesn't it take a thug to wrestle a thug to the ground?

I hope he'll make it up with Mary Harney . . . both of them are far too valuable to the country to waste themselves on dissension. I hope the next election will see Michael McDowell back in the position to which the Creator has called him . . . being superior to the rest of us. The NCT has no fans, not one, yet no one would claim that it isn't a good thing. He's like that.