Bertie Ahern was a happy man on Friday June 6th, 1997. Fianna Fáil and the PDs had won enough seats in the day's general election to form a government, with Mary Harney as the first woman Tánaiste in Irish history. In Co Galway, Bobby Molloy's supporters were preparing celebratory bonfires to mark his latest electoral success, and the prospect of a ministerial car coming to the constituency.
Nearby, a 19-year-old girl in the thoughtfully named townland of Camus, Connemara, was taking her first tentative steps away from a childhood during which she had been raped, buggered and abused by her father, Patrick Naughton. But on Thursday, June 19th, two weeks after the general election, she was almost stopped dead. Her father raped her again and throttled her so badly she thought she would die. Then he visited her in hospital, threatened to rape her in the toilets and told her he'd kill her if she spoke to anyone about him.
The girl used the pseudonym Loreto when she spoke to RTÉ's Rachel English but her story was already being sidelined because Molloy, her local TD, had sought to contact the trial judge on routine matters. Acting on behalf of Loreto's aunt, Naughton's sister, Molloy had made a number of interventions over a year concerning the case, and tried to determine if the judge had received letters from Anne Naughton. For Bobby Molloy, his downfall was assuming politics is exclusively local.
For Ahern, Harney and John O'Donoghue, the case of Loreto Naughton adds appalling insult to already appalling injury. The Department of Justice's fatal efficiency in dealing with Molloy's inquiries suggests that the Sheedy affair was not a sufficiently important learning experience to change practices among politicians or procedures within the Civil Service.
Civil servants don't set precedents, they follow them. If an official asks a judge if he is willing to take a call at home from a Government Minister, it is reasonable to ask if he is speaking in code.
Had the Government's hamfistedness not set the matter in a different context, this week would be a time to applaud Mr Justice O'Sullivan's sentencing in the Naughton case.
It would be contrasted with Justice Herbert's recent decision to give a rapist a suspended sentence because he didn't extend the boundaries of his crime by beating up or throttling his victim, although he had threatened to kill her.
It might be contrasted too with the unexamined decision to let a 26-year-old man walk away with suspension from a case where he had sex with a minor he first met in a chat room, and was sympathised with for being deceived into thinking she was almost twice as old as she was.
Mr Justice O'Sullivan's pointed remarks obviously highlight the need to keep scrutinising the separation of powers between legislature and judiciary, but their sub-text invites us to wonder how differently the stories of Bertie and Loreto unfolded over the last five years.
While he wrote his name into the history books, she negotiated the endless bureaucracy that faces any rape victim under Ahern's reign. While he opined and dined for Ireland around the world, she spent the full five years of his leadership trying to bring her father to justice through the Irish courts system.
After a full term in office, Ahern's Government's legacy on rape and sexual assault cases is worse than at any time in the State's history.
Reporting rates have increased, but convictions total only a handful each year. In 2000, for example, the number of convictions nationally measured less than 1 per cent of cases taken to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre alone in the same year.
Its report next week will be the first ever detailed survey on sexual abuse and violence in this country, and it was funded mostly through private sources.
Government commitments to help initiate a national awareness programme about the seriousness of rape got no further than the paper they were written on.
Promises to examine seriously the perceived need for separate legal representation for rape and sexual assault victims were left hanging - Loreto spent two full days in the witness box, and was cross-examined without the support of her own legal counsel.
Meanwhile, the backlog of cases mounted up to well over two years' waiting, and longer in Loreto's complex case. She first made a written complaint in September 1997, three months after John O'Donoghue was appointed Minister for Justice.
Whatever pressure he has experienced over the last four-and-a-half years pales in comparison to what she had to undergo.
Zero tolerance over the last five years has meant many things to many politicians, but it has not extended to sexual crime. Instead, the obstacles faced by the few brave enough to demand their day in court have increased. Despite Ahern, Harney and O'Donoghue playing down the impact of Molloy's intervention, the perception that a politician will make representations on behalf of a defendant is likely to inspire even less confidence in the system.
Loreto Naughton has won justice five years after the FF/PD Government took office. Others still wait to have their cases listed. Molloy made phone calls about a crime Ahern's Government doesn't take too seriously, yet no one calls this a scandal.