But a whole establishment of men who have become powerful or rich in Ireland is threatened by the very notion of Tribunals of Inquiry. Therefore it has become part of the national life that at any given time some rich or powerful man is banging on about one tribunal or another . . .

how long it has been going on, what a waste of public money it is, how upset the speaker and all belonging to him have been made by having to answer its questions, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing turns a man into a concerned citizen as quickly as hearing his own name on the lips of a tribunal lawyer.

Mind you, they never complain about what's making the tribunals so expensive because their own lawyers are in there, too, not to mention on constant alert to mount the legal challenges, usually unsuccessful, which delay the work of the tribunals. They never pause to mention the money that in the end will have been recovered for the Revenue Commissioners and the Criminal Assets Bureau. In fact, it is not tribunals they object to at all . . . you never hear a word said against the Morris Tribunal because it is obviously in the public interest to enquire into corruption in An Garda Siochana, no matter how long it may take.

It is scrutiny.

But it is in the public interest to examine 'certain planning matters and payments' which is what one tribunal is doing, and into 'payments to politicians and related matters' which is what the other is doing. The tribunals are about bribery. The possibility that a considerable number of our politicians were eminently bribeable is at least as important as the possibility that certain gardai in and around Donegal were running their own mad, macho statelet. In respect to both possibilities the question has rightly arisen . . . how high up did tacit consent to these abuses reach?

Everybody knew what was going on.

'Who's everybody?' you may say. 'I didn't know.' That's exactly why I'm such a fan of tribunals. They have inquisitorial powers which are otherwise denied to citizens . . .

even citizens in the know. And there were lots of those. Dublin-based media people knew a lot of things that came as a surprise to people at large. They knew, for example, that Terry Keane was Charlie Haughey's long-time mistress. But not only the gossip but knowledge . . . knowledge of the structural rottenness now being examined by the tribunals . . . was known and not shared.

Pieces that touched on the blatant . . . Liam Lawlor used to wink at me when he got the vote he wanted . . . goings-on at Dublin County Council were always 'lawyered' to bits.

Even a specialist like Frank McDonald who did everything he could to speak out could not find expression.

Newspapers do not have the status and powers of a tribunal. Journalists are not professionally trained in the law and paid a fortune daily and provided with researchers and given time and licence to pursue a single topic. They have no legal immunity. The people at the top in newspapers and RTE . . . remember those times?

Ray Burke was actually minister with responsibility for RTE . . . were silenced by legal threats, and by the way an incumbent government deploys a wide range of sanctions and seductions.

And as for the Opposition . . . I questioned Charlie Haughey once, myself, about his liaison with the Gallagher family at the start of his mystifying upward climb. How come his early house dealings apparently made him so much money? "How was I to know that the north was the direction the city would expand in?" he said, and his sullenness was a formidable thing. He knew that I knew that he wasn't even trying. I didn't dare go on. But there's immunity in the Dail. Leaving aside the cowed and the implicated, how did it come about that honourable people there stayed so quiet about what they suspected or knew?

We're not good at the truth. That's the truth. In the circumstances, it is a miracle that any tribunals were ever established.

Prayers of gratitude should be offered at mass. The reports they have so far published throw the only light we've ever had on how things really were, and this can be said without endorsing praise or blame for any individual they've singled out. So next time you hear someone huffing and puffing about how long the tribunals are taking to conclude their work and how they're a waste of public money (the someone usually has no track record at all in worrying about wasting public money), ask yourself . . . in whose interest is it to close them down? Is it in ours . . . the most of us? No, it's in theirs . . . the insider cabals who fed off our ignorance and who would continue to feed off it if they succeeded in discrediting the forum in which they might be held to account.