With what pleasure defenders of freedom and truth must have read the vituperative letter from Cllr Tiernan Brady of Donegal, which we published on Tuesday.
He attacked last Saturday's Editorial, which told something of the truth about the late Sean Doherty. Only something; and in its mildness and its documentary tone, it was a model of restraint.
The rule speak no ill of the dead is usually sound, but there are occasions when the public interest demands a departure from such normal post-mortem reticence; and amid all the encomiums and the plaudits after the death of the former Minister for Justice, somebody, somewhere had to set the record straight. This newspaper very properly undertook that duty - as it had to, after the most corrupt Minister for Justice in the history of the State was treated almost to a State funeral.
Though the President wasn't there, her aide-de-camp was. The late Minister's coffin was draped with the Tricolour, as if he had died in its service, rather than lied in his leader's. And infused throughout the entire proceedings was the sense that this was a great servant of the country who had somehow or other been betrayed by it.
The truth is that as a Minister, Sean Doherty betrayed this Republic.
Uniquely in our history, he arranged for our police to have the police force of another state kidnap a man on false pretences in order to prevent that man appearing as a witness against the Minister's brother-in-law in a court for which he, the Minister, was responsible. Moreover, he arranged illegal telephone-taps on journalists, not in the national interest, but in the interests of his party leader, Charles Haughey.
But there was more to Sean Doherty than that. On his watch, the rule of law almost ceased to exist in Roscommon, as he obliged his petitioning constituents in relation to drunk-driving and speeding charges. What garda was ever going to risk his career with such a man, who had absolutely no sense of right or wrong? For his real duties were defined not by any morality, but by loyalty to the extended clan that was his constituency, and his tribal chief who was Charles Haughey.
Indeed, he was not a political representative of a modern, secular society in which government serves the state; the reverse was the truth. He truly was a pre-Enlightenment man, who saw the state merely as a useful instrument to be manipulated in the service of his party and its leader.
For our Editorial not to have referred to some of the key events in Irish life in the past quarter-of-a-century, in which this strange character played such a central role, would have been like a deathbed survey of Richard Nixon's life without mentioning Watergate.
Moreover, one factor above all else made it obligatory not to hide the truth behind the usual parade of obsequies: the Garda scandal in Donegal.
For this wasn't a once-off affair, but a terrifying insight into what ordinary gardaí are capable of: lying, conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice, and a systematic and malevolent harassment of innocent individuals over a long period of time. This was worthy of the West Midlands police at their finest.
Now this scandal did not occur somewhere in the wilder reaches of the Belmullet peninsula or Connemara, but in the front line of the Border war against terrorism, the very area where our most élite and dedicated gardaí should have been deployed. Instead, we got corner-boys and liars who, far from being sacked after the shocking Morris revelations, have not even been suspended; instead, lucky, lucky Dublin is to have the benefit of their services.
In other words, there is something rotten at the heart of justice in Ireland, and this rottenness was not the creation of Sean Doherty but the concoction of generations of political manipulation of An Garda Síochána.
This corruption is so embedded that it even survived, intact, the urgent need for efficient policing as terrorism seeped over from the North, and the Provisional IRA effectively became masters over large parts of the Border counties. Concerted cross-party political will was required to put real steel into the force, yet was not forthcoming.
But even that doesn't explain why successive ministers for justice never insisted on gardaí being given proper firearms training, and why no hostage-rescue and stand-off unit was formed, even as we became the kidnap capital of Europe. The Donoughmores, Tiede Herrema, John O'Grady, Don Tidey, the Guinnesses, were all kidnapped by terrorist-criminal gangs, and yet the State never bothered to create policing units which could cope with such inevitable crises.
Why? Is it that our definition of the requirements of both law and order prefers the comforting ambiguities which inaction allows us? Fundamentally, as a State, did we wish the terrorist threat away, without feeling the compelling need to take the stern and unrelenting action which was required of us? Hundreds, thousands, might go to their graves in the North, and even a few dozen in the Republic, but just so long as our boat was not rocked too much, we were apparently content.
If Donegal gave us an alarming insight into the gardaí, the monumental deeds and the omissions by the Department of Justice over the decades provide a truly terrifying insight into the political culture of this Republic.
That we did not even properly investigate the biggest mass murder in Irish history, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, just about says it all.
And after that, anything which Sean Doherty did was small potatoes indeed.