Connect Eddie HoltMichael McDowell v Frank Connolly - what do you believe? It seems to be a row beyond rational analysis; one that's rooted in "tendency" and ideology. Nonetheless, people want to make up their minds on the matter but the chasm it opens has echoes that go back at least to the founding of this State.
It is a row about Progressive Democrats v Sinn Féin; law v media; state v individual. It is, ultimately, about power and right v wrong but, as it plays out, it's more fundamentally about right v left. People of a right-wing tendency will back McDowell. People of a left-wing tendency will favour Connolly. Polemicists and lawyers may argue forever but the right-left split seems a befitting breakdown.
There are a number of terms that need to be defined. Perhaps foremost among these is the "State". Who or what is it? Is it all of us, including McDowell as an equal, or does he, because he's Minister for Justice, have a greater claim than most of us, if a lesser one than, say, Bertie Ahern?
Alternatively, you could argue that any claim of a greater claim lessens the claimant. After all, in a democratic republic, one citizen is the precise equal of all others. Some politicians get to hold high public office but even the head of state - the president - is merely a first among equals.
McDowell has told a PD ("Democrats", remember!) meeting: "Our values are republican, our vision is republican, our methods are republican." Clearly, however, these claims are questionable.
Leaving ultra-contentious terms such as "values" and "vision" aside, consider McDowell's methods in persuading Charles "Chuck" Feeney to withdraw funding for the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI). A professor of law, Dermot Walsh, a former High Court judge, Feargus Flood, and numerous commentators have said that McDowell was utterly wrong in the use (abuse?) of his position. Perhaps he was, yet legal arguments have been mounted to support him.
Nonetheless, Flood has told RTÉ: "The citizens of this country are innocent until proven guilty in accordance with the rules of law. The Minister cannot override the Constitution under any circumstances. The Constitution provides that justice shall be administered in public, in court." Well, it hasn't been.
In (as far as the judge and many others are concerned) usurping the Constitution, is McDowell guilty of a crime? It is ironic that a man who lives by laws - laws about alcohol; laws about minors in pubs; laws about immigrants and asylum seekers; laws about badly behaved teenagers; promised media laws . . . laws, laws, laws - may, in his zeal, have broken the law.
There is an authoritarian tendency in Michael McDowell. His supporters argue that only such a tendency is adequate to counter the sophistry of the more generally acknowledged (more than the PDs anyway) republican movement.
In that sense, we are back to the division that pitted "Blueshirts" against the IRA. The very words must seem embarrassing to Tiger cubs and cub-ettes.
To older readers, however, perhaps such terms offer an albeit dark reassurance that New Ireland is just a loudmouth son of Old Ireland. Some problems haven't gone away, you know. This row gives continuity and McDowell's objection to Connolly as director of the CPI echoes even the Free State v Irregulars split of the civil war.
For the moment, in persuading Chuck Feeney to withdraw financial support for the CPI, McDowell appears to have won. But the Free State won the civil war and in less than a decade de Valera's Fianna Fáil were running the show and have more or less done so since. It's true that Connolly now faces having no job if the centre has to close, but as a result of his latest performance McDowell must be politically wounded.
It is telling that he never objected to Feeney's lavish funding of Irish higher education. (Then again, it arguably began the privatisation of the sector - a PD aim.) Yet Feeney money, when funding an outfit that was likely to investigate McDowell's purchase of a new prison site in north county Dublin, became quickly unwanted.
The problem for McDowell in all of this is that he's burning up even the authoritarianism a largely disinterested electorate affords him. He may succeed in having the CPI closed but it will be at a political cost to himself.
He may, of course, have decided that paying such a cost is worthwhile. If so, however, it raises the suspicion that he must really have feared its prison site investigation.
And so it goes. The giving by McDowell of information from a Garda file to Sam Smyth of the Irish Independent certainly seems at odds with the Minister's proposal in 2004 that gardaí who leak information, especially to the media, should face jail terms of up to five years.
Anyway, we can probably expect more of these spats. Investigative journalism is time-intensive and therefore expensive. There is a dearth of it in Ireland. Frank Connolly is very good at it.
McDowell has, I believe, done the State a disservice.