Attack on media smacks of hypocrisy

IT is disingenuous of Justice Minister Michael McDowell to round on the media for ringing alarm bells about corruption in high places.

He is being totally unrealistic if he expects either the media or the public to draw a veil over the events of 1997 when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern accepted the word of disgraced ex-minister Ray Burke that there was no truth in rumours he was involved in corruption.

As we now know with the certainty of the Flood Tribunal findings, Mr Burke was up to his neck in corruption at the time, taking massive bribes from developers.

There is a strong whiff of hypocrisy about this political attack on the media for revisiting events which, though they occurred five years ago, continue to reverberate through the corridors of Leinster House.

It is fair to suggest that if the president of the Progressive Democrats, self-appointed guardians of the high moral ground, was sitting on the opposition benches today, not only would he be encouraging press and television to do its bounden duty, he would be leading the charge. He would be apoplectic with moral outrage.

Minister McDowell states Mr Burke was a disgrace and that the former foreign affairs minister lied. He also concedes the investigation which Taoiseach Bertie Ahern conducted into those rumours was inadequate. That is the understatement of the year.

Yet he accuses the media of engaging in a “feeding frenzy” and of “mutual hysteria” in their reaction to the Flood Tribunal report. Let him tell that to the 20,000 punters who snapped up copies of the report, the first time political corruption was nailed.

Clearly, Mr McDowell has a political agenda. Predictably, he insists his party would not pull out of government now because of what happened in 1997.

Turning to rumours that a serving minister in the current Cabinet received a corrupt payment of £80,000, he has challenged anyone in the media with credible evidence to this effect to bring it to the gardaí or a tribunal.

Fair enough. But the minister should remember that despite continuous and persistent rumours about Mr Burke, until the Flood report, little could be written in stone without risk of the media becoming the target of costly libel cases.

The same might be said of long-running media interest in the nefarious activities of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey. That he was a kept man with a Charvet-shirt lifestyle was finally put in the public domain by the Moriarty Tribunal, which is also expected to report soon.

Despite Mr McDowell’s protestations, the political reality is that Bertie Ahern has questions to answer about his decision to appoint Ray Burke to Cabinet.

This paper makes no apology for asking why, for instance, he pressed ahead with the appointment after former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds warned him that “everything he knew” about Mr Burke indicated he was unsuitable for a Cabinet post.

Is Mr Ahern willing to release files, which, he says, were not alarming but that lead Mr Reynolds and ex-Justice Minister Maire Geoghegan Quinn to alert him about Mr Burke.

Finally, Mr Ahern has given three different explanations about what he knew when he appointed Mr Burke. What the ordinary decent people of this country want to know is where the truth lies?