Brendan Howlin re minded John O'Donoghue on Prime Time the other night that everybody knew the what, when and where of the Sheedy case. What they wanted to know was the why.
"I have no idea why," said Mr O'Donoghue. "It's a complete mystery - to me." Then he jerked to a halt, as if whoever was pulling the strings had suddenly let go.
The puzzle was beyond him. There was nothing for it but to follow his colleagues and take up position between a rock and a hard place with David Andrews or up a tree in north Dublin with Bertie Ahern.
Better there than to tempt fate by joining Mr Howlin and the rest of the country asking why a fatal accident and a drunk driving case had led to the resignation of two judges and the county registrar for Dublin.
Better indeed. You'd never know what you might find.
So Mr O'Donoghue closes his eyes and hopes for the best. But the mystery that boggles the Minister's mind need not be insoluble; and the means to solve it are available to him, with the help of a select committee of the Dail, the support of the Opposition and the co-operation of those who had a hand in the affair.
The Committee on Justice, Equality and Women's Affairs is ready to help: it has invited the former judges and official to appear before it; though when he was asked what would happen if they refused, the chairman, Eoin Ryan, meekly replied that the committee would, er, discuss it again.
The Opposition thinks it possible to secure their co-operation - if necessary by changing the law under which judges and former judges may not be compelled to give evidence to an Oireachtas committee. A Labour Bill has been drafted which would remove the exemption.
JOHN Bruton discovered another pressure point when he was told by Mr Ahern that the former judges' pensions cannot be paid until the Dail decides. So Mr Bruton wanted it made a condition of the payment that they should explain why they did what they did.
"We do not always start at the end of everything," Mr Ahern said, enigmatically. But he promised to consider a request from the committee if it ran into difficulties.
If it does, or if for any reason the question why goes unanswered, the Oireachtas - and the public - will be left with an incomplete and unconvincing account of events which damaged the administration of justice and threw some excitable lawyers into a state of confusion.
As things stand, the public is invited to believe that two clearly ambitious judges, both with high hopes of promotion, and a senior official with an impressive record in administration risked their careers in the affair.
We are told that neither personal nor political interests were at stake. The case came to the attention of the Supreme Court judge Hugh O'Flaherty when he happened to meet a neighbour's son and Mr Sheedy's sister. He spoke to the registrar. The case was listed for hearing by the Circuit Court (later High Court) judge, Cyril Kelly - not the judge who had imposed the sentence - and after a hearing which lasted less than two minutes Mr Sheedy was set free. He had served one year of a four-year sentence.
Between Mr O'Flaherty's meeting on the street in Donnybrook and Mr Sheedy's release, this extraordinary tale was marked by departures from normal procedure and, in some cases, blatantly irregular practices.
Some of these may be due to error or coincidence. Commentators who took the view from the start that the whole affair was a storm in a bone china teacup certainly thought so. The Chief Justice did not agree.
To claim that a series of minor errors and sheer coincidence - up to and including an appearance by the Taoiseach's ubiquitous friend Joe Burke - stretched from end to end of the affair is to push the credulity of the public to the limit.
And when it comes to suspect behaviour by those in authority, the public's limit is quickly reached: given its experience of clerical, political and financial scandal, the public is far from gullible.
The reaction to Colm Allen, an indignant barrister who showed up on Today FM last weekend, makes the point. When he disagreed with somebody - and he disagreed with everybody all the time - he spat out "with respect" as if it were an insult and barked objections at an invisible jury.
Which turned him down by about 20 to one.
This week, Mr O'Donoghue and others confidently announced that the resignations showed the regulatory system worked. It wasn't so: if Mr Sheedy hadn't been spotted in Tallaght his release would not have come to light.
Barristers have acquired some journalistic hangers-on over the years, admirers of Mr Allen and his peers at the Flood tribunal. Now they've taken up Mr O'Flaherty's cause and, for the first time in years, use the word compassion without a sneer.
A woman who telephoned Joe Duffy's programme this week made a lot more sense than any of the hangers-on with a moving story of how she'd met the judge.
She'd spent nine weeks in court during a murder trial, sometimes following what went on, sometimes too confused or too distressed to make sense of it. The murdered woman was her sister-in-law.
She'd watched the judges go by, saw and heard them in court, and wondered what they thought as they sat there. So when the case ended she contacted Nora Owen and asked if she could talk to a judge. The minister said why not.
She chose Mr O'Flaherty because he seemed the most approachable; and, to her surprise, he phoned her with an invitation to his chamber. They chatted for 1 1/2 hours while she told him what she thought of the system. He promised to take note of what she had to say.
The one condition he'd made was that she wouldn't ask him about cases - her sister-in-law's or any other - because he wasn't meant to talk about cases.
And that was a condition that he kept and she reciprocated. What the public needs to know is why the Sheedy case was different.