Haughey era isn’t over yet

WHAT a superb editorial (‘Intimidation like this is unacceptable’, December 22). At long last somebody in the mainstream media has told it like it is about Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fáil and their conduct in relation to the Mahon Tribunal.

While the Green party has now taken up residence on ‘Planet Bertie’ beside FF, the two surviving PDs and an assortment of so-called independents, Government attacks on the tribunal and denials and distortions in relation to its proceedings are an even more serious threat to democratic accountability — and Irish political life in general — than has been acknowledged so far.

For the rest of us on planet earth, and for anyone who has despaired about the media’s collective failure to report the Taoiseach’s testimony with the unflinching objectivity it deserves, reading your editorial was positively therapeutic — a leap up and punch the air moment. Let’s hope the antennae on the drifting Government satellite picked up the signal. We’ve been asked to believe the Haughey era ended with Haughey himself and it would be nice to find it was so. Maybe the result of the last election was as much to do with a national collective state of denial — an understandable reluctance on the part of a corruption-weary electorate to have to confront the possibility that it was far from over, that the rot may well have continued and that Haughey meant to signify more than was immediately apparent when he said Ahern was “the most devious, the most skilful, the most cunning of them all”.