Madam, - The inability to attend the hearings of the Mahon tribunal by Albert Reynolds must surely be the coup de grace for this judicial investigation.
The public interest has not been sustained despite the best efforts of the media to "sassy up" the deliberations. Most people quietly concede that there is something fundamentally wrong with the remit of the tribunal.
It has gone on for far too long and it must be obvious that no revelatory findings of major import are going to be forthcoming; the tribunal is self-consciously on the defensive, as regards public opinion. The reflexive action against The Irish Times is a spurious attempt to save its credibility.
The tribunal might have succeeded if more rigour had been applied and if its deliberations had not sprawled all over the place.
More especially, the ridiculous minutiae of the affairs of Bertie Ahern was, in my opinion, beyond the terms of reference.
A tribunal per se is warranted because it states that we, the people, need to know more. It raises its impartiality above all other agencies of the State. We must believe in its judgments.
Let us hope we learn from this because the citizens of this republic will rightly baulk, at some future time, at the mere mention of another tribunal. - Yours, etc,
DAVID LYONS,
Usher's Island,
Dublin 8.