There is a uniquely cynical opportunism to Michael McDowell. An opportunism all the more odious by its presentation as principled, wrapped in intellectual and moral conceit. No loyalty immune from that opportunism, as Mary Harney knows all too well.
Last Sunday McDowell said he had discovered over the previous few days from a variety of sources that the information he had received from Bertie Ahern last October about his (Ahern's) personal finances was "far from complete" and that Ahern's failure "to account in a comprehensive and credible way to the Irish people for [disparities in the account he gave last October about his financial affairs and the information that now has become available] would make it impossible for him credibly to seek the endorsement of Dáil Éireann for a further term as Taoiseach when the new Dáil meets".
Nevertheless, Ahern remains an acceptable coalition partner in Government for the PDs for the time being.
This was five days after McDowell had said he saw no reason to be concerned at all over the revelations of Frank Connolly of two days previously in the Mail on Sunday concerning Ahern. He (McDowell) was not going to conduct a parallel tribunal of investigation into Ahern's affairs.
It had emerged the previous Sunday that Ahern's then partner Celia Larkin, just at the time it was expected Ahern was to become Taoiseach on December 5th, 1994, had opened two bank accounts, one with the rough equivalent of £30,000stg and the other with IR£50,000.
Ahern's explanation for these monies was:
(a) he got £30,000stg in cash from his Manchester friend, Michael Wall, who wanted to use it to refurbish a new house which he was about to let to him (Ahern) for a very modest amount;
(b) the IR£50,000 was his own money, IR£28,000 of which he had in a savings account (he said last October that all his savings were gone by January 1994, and the money from his first set of pals had gone towards clearing off a bank loan to pay for legal fees related to his marriage separation), and IR£22,000 accrued from the two whip-arounds in October 1994, one from a second set of pals in Dublin and the other from his Manchester friends - odd, isn't it, that his pals thought that he was ever in financial trouble given his extraordinary capacity for saving?;
(c) that he had intended at the time to put this IR£50,000 towards the refurbishment of the house Wall was about to buy, even though he was only going to rent it (IR£80,000 for the refurbishment of a new house worth IR£130,000!)
Also, we knew from that Connolly story that Wall later made a will leaving the house to Ahern, and that Ahern engaged in several foreign currency transactions in 1994 and 1995.
McDowell on Tuesday of last week found nothing at all peculiar about all this. But by Sunday it had blown up into a major crisis, threatening the appropriateness of his Coalition partner, Ahern as Taoiseach after the coming election.
It isn't remotely believable he found out anything of any consequence in the days between Tuesday and Friday, when the PDs first went into a crisis of conscience over continuance in Government with Ahern over and above what Connolly had revealed the previous Sunday.
The only new development was an appreciation by McDowell that his own personal credibility was already shot through and through by his acquiescence in Ahern's protestations that there was nothing suspicious or abnormal over what had occurred and that his own and his party's electoral fortunes were heading rapidly down the drain.
Precisely the same happened last October when, for a few days, McDowell and the PDs suffered another crisis of what they call their consciences. Then in return for a public apology by Ahern, they remained in Government with him even though it was apparent the most obvious questions remained unanswered then about his personal finances.
Notable among those questions was: why did he (Ahern) not open a bank account in his own name in the period 1987 to 1993, a period during which he had saved IR£50,000 that he kept in his constituency office safe, if it wasn't to conceal these monies from the courts during a time he was in litigation over his marriage separation?
McDowell would have known full well the significance of such concealment.
There might be a credible answer to this question, but one thing is clear. McDowell did not get such a credible answer, for had he got it the rest of us would have got it too. But that did not bother him at all then, for he thought he was seen to have acted with moral authority in getting Ahern to apologise.
Whatever Ahern did over his money, it must be placed in the balance with his achievements and the innate decency of his character. Unlike some.