Tales of ordinary madness come dropping quickly these days. By now, we are immune to shock. The excesses of bankers and politicians and the keepers of fiefdoms in the public and private sectors no longer stop us in our tracks. We get angry, but we are beyond shock.

Then along comes a Supreme Court ruling from that dusty land of the tribunals and an old familiar feeling creeps back. Et tu, Flood?

On Wednesday, the court delivered a judgment on an application to overturn a ruling on costs for attending at the inquiry. Two executives of the building firm JMSE, Joe Murphy Jnr, the chairman, and Frank Reynolds, had their appeal against the denial of costs upheld. The matter rests, to a large extent, on a technicality.

The tribunal had found that Murphy was involved in bribing Ray Burke to the tune of forty grand. Reynolds was found to have assisted in putting the money together. That was way back when the tribunal was a pup, in the late '90s, and through the turn of the century. The whole show was based on a single witness, James Gogarty, who was a grumpy old man hauling a grudge around town.

The real meat in last week's judgement was comment that accompanied the issue of costs. It turns out that the tribunal wasn't playing by the rules back then. Private interviews between the tribunal lawyers and Gogarty were edited. Gogarty had made "allegations of impropriety, some extremely grave, against other unconnected people," Hardiman ruled.

"They [Murphy and Reynolds] say that this material was manifestly relevant to the question of Mr Gogarty's credibility and that it was quite wrongly not disclosed to them."

Hardiman and his fellow judges agreed. In effect, the businessmen were denied the opportunity to properly defend their reputations against allegations of criminality.

A tribunal is set up to investigate matters of public interest. When the public can't trust the tribunal to conduct itself impartially, who can we trust? The idea that a tribunal is a disinterested body, investigating and adjudicating on facts without fear or favour, is the whole point of such an inquiry.

It would appear that the tribunal in this case was over-anxious to protect the man whom they believe held the key to uncovering corruption. In doing so, they may well have abused the rights of those against whom allegations of corruption were being made.

The abuse of rights of anybody – whether they be hardened criminals, bent businessmen or the Mother Superior of a confined order – is something that requires the utmost vigilance, and, if possible, correction. In his judgement, Hardiman referenced the Guildford Four, who spent 16 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit. Evidence was withheld by the prosecution in that case.

The events surrounding this apparent abuse of rights were somewhat different. What if the edited material had been discovered when it happened or soon after?

Back then, the tribunal was under severe pressure. Serious interests with serious money wanted it stopped. It is not fanciful to think that if the conduct of the tribunal was itself on dodgy legal ground the chairman Feargus Flood would have been forced to resign (Flood knew of the editing of the interview.) The senior lawyers would also have to go. Quite possibly, the whole thing would have been shut down.

Ray Burke would never have been exposed as a deeply corrupt man at the nexus of planning and politics. Frank Dunlop would most likely have accumulated greater wealth through the bubble years and might well now be hosting a TV programme instead of doing time for corruption.

The culture of corruption that infected the planning process would never have been uncovered. Three garda investigations over the previous 25 years came up with naught. If Flood fell, we would be told that it was all about begrudgery and vicious rumours. Now we know it was the way things were done.

There would have been little or no reform of the laws on political donations, nor an incentive for the corrupt to desist from giving or receiving money. The culture of impunity would have prevailed through the bubble years, and you can imagine the enhanced level of corruption that would have gone on through a property bubble when money was falling out of trees.

And then there is the matter of Bertie Ahern. He may have been unlucky to find himself ensnared in the tribunal's inquiry. But was it not in the public interest that we know how the leading political figure of the last 20 years really conducted himself while in office?

In terms of procedure, expediency and, in particular, expense, the inquiry has been a disaster; it has not yet even issued its final report. Thankfully, we will never see anything like it again.

But what if it had been strangled at birth? Would the country really be better off now? It was deemed necessary because the state's legal framework on laws and inquiries was incapable of investigating something the dogs in the street knew to be afoot. (Why the legal framework was designed in that manner is a question for another day.)

There are no heroes in this story. After the publication of the first major tribunal report in 2002, Flood was lauded and revelled in the attention. He can be viewed in a different light now.

People were done wrong at the inquiry. It's a good thing that those wrongs have been uncovered. History, and the nature of corruption, might been a whole lot different if they were discovered at the time.