Analysis: The Centre for Public Inquiry is standing solidly behind Frank Connolly, writes Mark Hennessy.
Since the Frank Connolly controversy erupted in the Dáil on December 6th, members of the board and staff of the Centre for Public Inquiry have been hard to find and even harder to entice to explain their side of the story.
Last night, the centre's chairman, former High Court judge Mr Justice Feargus Flood, lambasted the Minister for Justice for his attack on Connolly, claiming the centre had "provoked the ire" of vested interests since its establishment.
Though it is becoming increasingly complicated, the state of knowledge enjoyed by key parties at certain times over the last few months is crucial before one has any hope of making an assessment as to whom to believe.
Producing a letter from the DPP's office, Mr Justice Flood said Connolly's solicitor, Greg O'Neill, had been told that the Director of Public Prosecutions had decided in March 2003 not to prosecute the former journalist for travelling on a false Irish passport. This, said the judge, showed that McDowell, deprived of the chance of seeing Connolly in court, then opted for "a private and public blackening" of his name.
However, the statement from Mr Justice Flood omitted a qualifying line contained in the letter from the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Barry Donoghue, which was seen by The Irish Times last night.
Having said that the DPP had decided in March 2003 not to prosecute, Donoghue went on: "I should however state that that decision would be subject to review should further evidence come to light."
In the past, the DPP never communicated with anyone about anything, though under James Hamilton, the office has taken to replying to solicitors in such circumstances more and more frequently, according to a legal source.
Sometimes the sentence is included in the letters just to be careful; sometimes, it is what it says: a sword of Damocles that can be brought down hard if the landscape changes.
The Minister's state of knowledge in 2003 is significant because he and the Department of Justice's Secretary General, Seán Aylward, last September swore Chuck Feeney to secrecy about the passport application.
The two men said they did not know if gardaí would seek a prosecution and that disclosure would scupper any hope of one, despite Feeney's wish and need to share this information with colleagues and others.
In November, Aylward, pressed by Feeney, went back to the gardaí who told him that they were finished with the case.
By the end of the month, McDowell had given the bogus passport application to the Irish Independent.
However, it is difficult to see how it benefited him to deny knowledge of the state of the investigation in September unless he genuinely did not know it.
If anything, the Minister has been determined to get out as much negative information about Connolly's role as executive director of the centre as possible.
The Garda passport application investigation was substantially finished by March 2003, though the Garda file remained open, if not actively managed, while the so-called Colombia Three case proceeded in Bogota.
The issue became "live" following the announcement in August that the three men, Connolly's brother, Niall, James Monaghan and Martin McCauley, had arrived back in the State sometime before.
In September, two senior Garda detectives went to Colombia for talks with the Colombian authorities, to discuss the Colombia Three. The movements or otherwise of Frank Connolly are unlikely to have escaped attention.