I have a confession to make. I was the journalist who interviewed Mary Harney when she said Charlie Haughey should go to jail. I'm not proud of it. The charges against the former taoiseach of obstructing the McCracken tribunal were subsequently abandoned by order of judge Kevin Haugh in the Circuit Court, partly because the remark by the then tánaiste might hamper a fair trial. It was a proper decision.

As relieved as Haughey was, Harney must have been racked with guilt. It was his despotic leadership that drove her from Fianna Fáil, yet here she was handing him the key to get out of jail.

The question had innocently arisen towards the end of the interview in her Kildare Street office. I remember it was around midday on a Friday and she was anxious not to be late for the wedding of her party chairman John Dardis's daughter down the country.

We probably both realised instantly that her words were dynamite (the ethics of reporting them is a separate debate) but the long-term damage was worse than either of us anticipated. Ever since, it has given the state a big whip with which to deny information to the citizens which is rightfully ours. The fear of pre-judging a court case has become the grown-ups' version of the bogey man lurking under the bed.

In the last week, Mary Harney's faux pas has been resurrected time and again to justify the government's refusal to identify the Anglo 10 on the grounds that naming them could prejudice a prosecution.

This is nonsense. Unlike Haughey, no charges have been brought against anyone in the matter of Anglo Irish Bank. There is no, as government ministers keep calling it, "due process" under way which militates against the disclosure of the names.

An investigation by the corporate enforcer is not governed by the contempt of court rules that apply to judicial procedures where, once charges are brought, a gag is put on public discussion of the case until a verdict is reached.

The stand-off over naming names was just one of three distinct and worrying examples of information being suppressed for purported legal reasons both by and in the Oireachtas last week.

The first happened when, to nobody's surprise, Seán FitzPatrick, former chief executive and chairman of Anglo Irish – our bank – refused to meet the Dáil committee on economic and regulatory affairs. His thanks-but-no-thanks came with the stock excuse that he had received legal advice not to co-operate, as did the bank's auditors, Ernst & Young, before him.

Then, on Thursday, the public accounts committee published its report on the profligacy in Fás but was legally constrained from blaming individuals because of their constitutional right to a good name.

Protecting citizens' reputations is a commendable ideal but due process is a two-way street. When public servants live it up with their spouses on first-class junkets at the nation's expense, their fellow citizens' right to know gets trampled.

All over this country there are people who have suffered severely from the crime of child sexual abuse and have been deprived of recourse to the criminal courts by decisions of the DPP. How second-class they must feel when they see flagrant abusers of state resources being sheltered by legal niceties while the rest of us pick up the tab.

Official Ireland regards information as a dangerous thing. That attitude is plain to see in the whittling away of freedom-of-information legislation and the criminalising of 'leaks' by gardaí. More and more, the laws of the land that were designed to facilitate democracy are being manipulated to deprive us of it instead.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie