Instead, a lot of it never happened at all. It is just a figment of your imagination.

Everything that matters starts now. Going forward.

Last Tuesday evening, the great and the good of Fianna Fail in Mayo gathered in the Welcome Inn in Castlebar for the first of a series of like-toget-to-know-youagain meetings with Beverley Flynn. She is about to re-enter the party stratosphere, on the explicit instructions of Bertie Ahern.

Bev was ejected from the party organisation in 2004, on the explicit instructions of Bertie Ahern. She had done wrong. The Supreme Court had just rejected her appeal of a High Court judgement that she had effectively aided and abetted tax evasion in her capacity as an executive with National Irish Bank in the early 1990s.

The case arose out of a libel action she took against RTE for airing a broadcast about her role in that activity. She gave evidence over six days in the 2001 hearing, but the jury didn't believe her, despite a display of tears apparently brought on by the trauma to which the brutes in RTE had subjected her.

Few in the court believed her. Few outside the court believed her. The Supreme Court judges rejected her appeal. Bertie obviously didn't believe her either. He wanted her cast into the wilderness. A few months after her ejection, two High Court Inspectors concluded that they didn't believe her either.

Now she's back. On Tuesday, RTE was on hand to record the gathering. Teresa Mannion asked one female attendee what she thought of Bev's past life. The woman sniffily suggested that if the reporter did her research, she would find that an awful lot of people were at the same thing back then.

This line is the main plank of Beverley's own defence. "I have been singled out and scapegoated for what was in effect bank policy, " she told Sean O'Rourke last June. "I never did anything wrong. I always believed that I worked within the law." She added that she had nothing to apologise for.

Her stance is confusing. If there was nothing wrong with bank policy, if it was conducted within the law, what was she being scapegoated for? If bank policy was outside the law, how could she not be wrong in carrying it out?

In any event, she would be entitled to some slack if that were the extent of the matter.

Everybody deserves a second chance. She was young and in a hurry. Tax evasion was rampant at the time. There is a place in politics for rehabilitation. The past is a different country.

That is also the party line, flowing from the leader.

But what about the other past, the one which all involved want to pretend never happened?

Flynn didn't just facilitate tax evasion. She attempted to wield the law as a weapon to silence those who legitimately investigated her activities. If the High Court jury was correct . . . and everybody from the Supreme Court judges to Bertie Ahern accepts that it was . . . then Flynn sat in the witness box for six days and related a tissue of lies under oath.

She occupied the role of lawmaker, yet she showed contempt for the law by bringing a bogus case to court.

Flynn still insists she did nothing wrong. She couldn't say otherwise without admitting to perjury. In many ways, the attempt at cover-up . . . which is what the libel action amounted to . . . was worse than the offence itself.

Has the record of all of that disappeared into the ether? Is Fianna Fail now so secure as a party of power that anything goes with its members as long as they bring in the votes? The message it sends out is clear. If you lie, cheat, steal, or whatever, don't admit to it. Attempt to brazen it out, even if such a course means compounding your transgression. If that doesn't work, just hold tough until the smoke clears, and you'll be back in harness in jig time.

Perhaps Bev can discuss these issues with her party leader on her re-entry. They might even get around to swapping stories about how to spin great yarns from the witness box.