Political memoirs offer clear choice between integrity and corruption

I WORKED for a couple of years with Frank Dunlop. Not a lot of people are prepared to admit that.

What's more, he once gave me two bottles of good French wine. Produced them from the boot of his car, he did, and waved away my protestations with a flourish. I was protesting because it hadn't occurred to me to get him a Christmas present. But I admit here and now that I enjoyed the wine and that I never made a statement to the Flood Tribunal about it.

I never, on the other hand, worked with Austin Currie, though I knew him slightly when he was a TD and got to watch him at close quarters when he became a presidential candidate.

He made me more money than Frank ever did, because the minute I heard he was entering the race for the presidency in 1990, I knew that Mary Robinson could come ahead of him, and thus had a tremendous chance of beating Brian Lenihan on the basis of Austin's transfers. So I immediately put on a bet on Mary Robinson, one hundred good old-fashioned pounds at odds of 10-1.

The nice people at Paddy Power's ultimately sent me a cheque for £1,100 and a bottle of pink champagne. They enclosed a note revealing that mine had been the first bet on the presidential election, and that they had lost a bundle by opening a book on Mary Robinson. Thankfully for them, however, they had won three bundles by taking in bets on Brian Lenihan.

I don't know what else Frank Dunlop and Austin Currie have in common (and I don't suppose they'd recognise me as a common link anyway). They are both very lucky in the women they married, they have both had tragedy and difficulty in their lives, they both published books in the last week or so, and they were both interviewed by Marian Finucane during last week.

That's probably about it. Otherwise they couldn't have been more different.

One sacrificed a huge amount for politics and public service, the other used politics to enrich himself. One is a man of honour and integrity, the other a venal chancer.

I haven't read either book yet, though I listened to the interviews both men did with Marian Finucane. Dunlop's was on earlier in the week, sufficiently early that my memory of Marian's very sharp interview with Eamon Ryan of the Green Party was still vivid.

At first I found myself wondering how come Frank Dunlop deserved so much more sympathetic an interview than Eamon Ryan had, but gradually I began to find myself drawn into Frank Dunlop's web.

And I began to remember that he had always been very good at that, painting a picture of himself as slightly roguish and yet as a charming broth of a boy.

Like the time when we worked together on a late-night television show that we both presented. He was great at stirring it up, willing to take whatever side of the argument would produce the best results on television, never short of a quip or even, if he thought it would make better television, an insult.

Off-air he was a fund of stories, of the kind that you found yourself wondering how true could they really be. And now, I gather, some of those stories have found their way into his book.

But a bit of a cloud appeared over the series on the day we discovered that Frank was on the list of witnesses for the Flood Tribunal.

At first it was nothing too serious. Now and again the Tribunal would be the major story in the news for the week, and we would agree that it would have to be discussed on the programme.

Frank would always say, "I might have to opt out of that bit of the discussion, because of course I have to bear in mind that I mustn't prejudice my evidence in front of the Tribunal." And we respected that. It seemed clear that anyone appearing in front of a Tribunal would have to be judicious about what they said in public about it.

Off-air, he was scathing about the Tribunal, referring to it as "la-la land," and constantly belittling what he saw as its trumped-up nature.

He went on so much and so often about it that I began to wonder was there something going on. An inveterate spinner like Frank wouldn't be repeating the same message over and over again unless he was trying to plant seeds.

So we sat him down one day, about a month before his first appearance at the Tribunal, and pressed him hard about whether he felt he had anything to worry about. He hadn't, he assured us. He had engaged accountants to go through his books, as well as a firm of solicitors, and they had certified that he was as clean as a whistle.

The only thing, he told us, was that the trawl he had initiated through all his past transactions had uncovered one or two inadvertent bits of unpaid or unreturned tax, and he had cleared all that up. He had given a full account of everything to the Tribunal, and thought the whole thing would be over in a few hours.

We believed it that's how good a story-teller Frank is. He went to the Flood tribunal determined to cover up everything and to bluster his way through. It wasn't until they discovered his offshore accounts and the degree to which he was siphoning off money that he broke.

Now, the way he tells it is that the judge asked him to reflect and he decided that the right and moral thing to do was to become a whistle-blower. In fact he turned on the people he had bribed after he was caught with his own hand in the till.

He's clearly looking for some kind of rehabilitation now. But as long as he is going around saying that he "didn't invent the system" and pretending to be some kind of victim, he doesn't deserve it.

AUSTIN CURRIE, on the other hand, confronted a system that was built on bigotry and intolerance in Northern Ireland. It was a system that had made victims of many of his friends and neighbours, and he fought it throughout his career through political work and action. And when others responded with terrorism, he fought them too. He may never have reaped the full rewards of his politics, but he was never deterred by that. He just kept on fighting for the people he represented. You can't ask more of a politician than that.

So if you're thinking of going out to buy a book about politics this week, choose carefully.

The character at the centre of one may be a charming rogue, but the other one is about a real democrat.

Charming rogues are two a penny, but real democrats are special.