A detailed examination of Bobby Molloy's interventions in the Naughton rapeand sex abuse case suggests that contacts between departments and judgesgoes on all the time, writes Fintan O'Toole
After he raped his daughter for the last time in June 1997, Patrick Naughton tried to rape her again in hospital.
There, in the bathroom, he told her that the story of his assaults on her was out, but he warned that after he spent some time in prison he would be back, and she was not to forget that.
In other words, Naughton was not merely a serial rapist who had begun to prey on his daughter when she was just nine years old, he was also a man who had issued specific threats about what would happen when he got out of prison.
Less than a week after Naughton was convicted, one of the country's most experienced and widely respected politicians, a man who, although technically a junior minister, had a seat at the cabinet table, wrote to the Minister for Justice.
Bobby Molloy's letter to John O'Donoghue of November 6th last showed considerable knowledge of the Naughton case. He was able, for example, to give the precise dates on which the trial had begun and ended, October 22nd and 31st.
He knew that the rapist had not been sentenced and that the case was therefore at an extremely sensitive stage, when the judge, Mr Justice Philip O'Sullivan, was thinking through the precise demands of justice.
He chose to pass on a query from Naughton's sister as to whether the rapist who had threatened his daughter could walk the streets for a while longer. "She is anxious to know if he must remain in prison until the appeal is heard or can he be released and continue to report to An Garda Síochána as previously required of him."
This is the core of an affair in which, for the second time, after the resignation of Albert Reynolds over the fallout from the Brendan Smyth case, Irish politics has been rocked by the repercussions of child sexual abuse. That core itself is deeply rotten, eaten away by a rampant clientilism in which the political messenger-boy takes no moral responsibility for the message which he is delivering.
Around it, however, there is another layer of scandal. It is the revelation of a system in which this kind of thing is thought of as perfectly normal, a system that for all the sheaves of paper flying around this week, is still wrapped in obfuscation. For it is by no means clear that the full truth of what went on has yet been revealed.
The Phone Calls: We know that Mr Justice O'Sullivan got two phone calls on March 19th, while he was still considering the appropriate sentence for Naughton; one from the Department of Justice and another from an official in Bobby Molloy's office.
The immediate circumstances of the second call are not fundamentally in dispute. The official inquired of the judge whether he had received a letter from Anne Naughton. There are, however, contradictions and absurdities surrounding the official account of the first call. According to Mr Justice O'Sullivan, the Department of Justice official asked him if he would take a phone call at home from Bobby Molloy concerning the Naughton rape case.
The accounts of both Molloy and O'Donoghue come nowhere close to explaining how a call of this nature could have been made. In the first place, O'Donoghue claims that his officials did not know that the query from Molloy related to a court case at all. If this is so, how could the official have told the judge that Bobby Molloy wanted to speak to him about the Naughton rape case?
It is also difficult to understand how the Department of Justice official who spoke to the judge could have understood that the putative phone call from Molloy would refer to the Naughton rape case. This official, on John O'Donoghue's account, was prompted to call the judge by another civil servant in O'Donoghue's office, who had in turn been phoned by an official in Molloy's office.
This initial phone call specifically referred to Anne Naughton's letters, yet we are told the official who took it "didn't know that the correspondence related to a case". It seems extraordinary that someone being contacted in relation to Anne Naughton would not at least ask who she was.
Two other aspects of this call are deeply puzzling. One is so obvious that it has escaped comment. The official account says the Department of Justice official phoned the judge to find out the judge's phone number. This is like putting on your glasses to look for your glasses. In order to phone the judge, the Department official had to have his number already.
The only rational explanation is that the number being sought was in fact the judge's private home number. But here we run up against further inconsistencies.
According to John O'Donoghue, his official only asked for the judge's home number as an afterthought. The query was made only when the judge said he was leaving his office within the next minutes. We are left then with the bizarre claim that the initial purpose of calling the judge was to get the phone number of the office that was being called.
There is a further gaping hole in the official accounts. O'Donoghue's accounts in his written statement and media interviews are consistent: the call was made because Molloy wanted to speak to the judge. Molloy, however, interviewed yesterday on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, was absolutely clear: "I didn't want to talk to the judge at all."
If he didn't want to talk to the judge, why was a Department of Justice official trying to get the judge's private number for Bobby Molloy? And how did the official come to believe his job was to get the judge's number for Bobby Molloy?
O'Donoghue's statement says the original contact from Molloy's office on March 19th was to establish "whether the judge had received correspondence from Ms Naughton". This is not, however, what the Justice official actually asked the judge. He told Mr Justice O'Sullivan that Molloy or someone on his behalf wished to speak to him.
It is difficult to understand how a civil servant could take a request for information about whether a judge had received correspondence and turn it into a very specific attempt to arrange a call between the judge and the minister unless there was some other stage in this process which has not yet been revealed.
The Department of Justice: If Mr Justice O'Sullivan had not reconvened his court on Wednesday, the public would have known only that Bobby Molloy had made a query about correspondence from Anne Naughton which was inadvertently directed to the judge himself.
It would not have known that Molloy had been pushing the Department of Justice on the issue since March 2001 or that this pressure had eventually resulted in a call from the Department of Justice to Mr Justice O'Sullivan. In effect, a cover-up would have been achieved.
Even after the judge revealed the involvement of the Department of Justice, however, there were crucial omissions in the account given by John O'Donoghue.
Specifically stating that he was giving this information "for the sake of completeness", O'Donoghue referred to three letters, two to him from Molloy on March 13th, 2001, and January 31st, 2002, and one from him to Molloy on April 30th, 2001. This account, however, was radically incomplete. It did not mention 12 other letters.
The initial statement issued by O'Donoghue on Wednesday contained a long quote from his own reply to Molloy in April 2001. Yet, when the existence of further correspondence became known on Thursday, John O'Donoghue suggested that the full files had only become available. It seems a remarkable coincidence that the letter which exonerated the Minister was found on Wednesday, while the ones which put him in a less flattering light were not found until the following day.
Nor does O'Donoghue's explanation for the withholding of the other 12 letters - that he did not know of their existence at the time - seem to make much sense. Six of the letters were sent or received since the start of this year. All of them were personal correspondence from one minister to another, not routine pieces of administrative business.
There is, however, one credible explanation for why O'Donoghue would not have remembered these letters: that they were in some sense routine. If the letters were unusual, he would surely have remembered them. Conversely, if he forgot them, it may be because they were simply par for the course. What we may be looking at, in other words, is not a scandalous breach of the normal separation between the executive and the judiciary, but a far bigger scandal: that this kind of thing is common.
The system: What has emerged, particularly in radio interviews this week, is that both O'Donoghue and Molloy felt there was nothing unusual about ministers contacting judges or about ministers from other departments trying to lean on the Department of Justice.
John O'Donoghue, on RTÉ's Five-Seven Live on Wednesday, said: "There are many, many legitimate reasons why a minister might in fact wish to speak to a judge, many, many legitimate reasons . . . I know that there are contacts from time to time." He also said: "It is true that people from time to time do send correspondence to the Minister for Justice. Various politicians around the country do that, individuals do that."
Bobby Molloy, on Morning Ireland yesterday, said of the letters: "I see nothing wrong with any of these letters. I have sent letters like this before to ministers looking for information in response to requests from constituents and I think that other parties will have to admit that they have done the same. I see nothing wrong with it, seeking information."
It is worth noting in this context that O'Donoghue's reply to Molloy's query about the possibility of Naughton being released was somewhat more nuanced than O'Donoghue has claimed. He actually told Molloy that Naughton could not be considered for temporary release because he had not been sentenced. The implication is that the request could at least be considered if the sentencing process were complete.
We know from the Philip Sheedy affair that John O'Donoghue has received requests for the temporary release of serving prisoners from senior colleagues. No less senior, indeed, than the Taoiseach who, in July 1998, asked him to consider Sheedy's temporary release.
This, after all, is why a woman like Anne Naughton would direct her inquiries about her brother's case through a senior politician rather than simply picking up the phone and asking her brother's solicitor. It is the expectation that expressions of interest from on high will be received with special attention that is at the heart of this scandal.
What we need to know is how often such expressions are in fact made and whether all the judges who receive them have Mr Justice O'Sullivan's courage to speak out.