Nothing has been as nauseating over the past week as the sight or sound of government ministers trotting out what they claim to be the real story. To be fair to them, they manage to keep straight faces as they peddle the muck.

It's all about the "sinister leak", designed to damage the country's leader, spread rumours, blacken by innuendo, and, if we're not careful, maybe undermine the fabric of society.

On Tuesday evening, Mary Hanafin told Miriam O'Callaghan that the only question of public interest remaining was who leaked. On Friday, Brian Cowen said on Morning Ireland that 98% of coverage was being given over to Bertie's money and only 2% to the sinister leak. In between, Willie O'Dea was within shooting range of a radio station every day, and Dick Roche came out to bore for Ireland with his witch-hunt waffle. What really took the biscuit, though, was Michael McDowell's statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "I condemn the unlawful, very carefully timed, ill-motivated betrayal of confidence by someone with access to the papers of the tribunal."

Let's get real for a moment. If it was just pathetic spin the ministers were guilty of, it could be let pass. But each of them is guilty of gross hypocrisy, and bears responsibility for covering up for a far more serious leak not so long ago.

The material on Ahern was factual. Its dissemination was manifestly in the public interest, whether or not the motivation to leak it was political. Any rumours that circulated after the story was published were largely down to Ahern's own unwillingness to come clean early on.

Last December, all those high-minded ministers retrospectively endorsed a leak by McDowell on a garda file on Frank Connolly, a development that could properly be filed under the label "sinister". That leak was politically motivated. Mary Harney believed that the Centre for Public Inquiry, of which Connolly was the director, should have no role in public life.

Unlike the Ahern leak, that on Connolly was not based on fact, but allegations, which in turn were deemed too weak to sustain a criminal charge. McDowell stated them as fact. Unlike in Ahern's case, there was no sustainable public interest attached to making public the details of Connolly's file.

The rest of the cabinet didn't get all high-minded about McDowell's activity.

None of them questioned the legality of McDowell's actions, or, as might be expected in a mature democracy, called for a full inquiry. McDowell said an obscure provision in the Official Secrets Act bestowed legality on his actions, a claim that went untested. No minister mounted a high ethical or legal horse. And we are now expected to take them seriously when they waffle on about a "sinister leak"?

That episode last year has a certain resonance with the current crisis. The cabinet backed McDowell and thus closed down any investigation that might have thrown up unpalatable answers.

Now McDowell is back again with a problem, and this time it's Ahern's head, rather than his own, that is on the block.

It remains to be seen whether he's in the mood to return a favour that was extended him not so long ago.