The Flood tribunal on payments and planning was encouraged by this week's Supreme Court decision that its hearings should be open to the public.
Indeed, the decision might be read as a prescription for all such inquiries. It held that the common good outweighed the constitutional right to privacy of someone against whom allegations had been made.
The court decided the tribunal should proceed without further delay. It declared: "The exigencies of the common good require that matters considered by both Houses of the Oireachtas to be of urgent public importance be inquired into, particularly when such inquiries are necessary to preserve the purity and integrity of public life."
And David Gwynn Morgan wrote in this newspaper of "the tension between the interest of one individual in his reputation and . . . the authority of an impartial tribunal set up by the Oireachtas to go about its duties in the public interest . . ."
"The unusual feature," wrote the law professor, "is that on this occasion the tribunal won."
But a tribunal's hearings and reports are only half the battle, the openness with which accountability must begin. Even with openness and accountability, it takes political will and official co-operation to complete the task.
It's a fact of public life with which the Dail's Public Accounts Committee was confronted this week when it returned to the scene of the beef tribunal.
The judge (now Chief Justice) presided over the longest, most complicated, most expensive and least conclusive of our major inquiries: set up in May 1991, it heard 475 witnesses and reported in more than 700 pages in July 1994.
Court actions punctuated its progress: one invoked Cabinet confidentiality to limit disclosure. It hastened the collapse of the first Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrat coalition in 1992 and provoked bitter disagreements between FF and Labour in 1994.
But the cost - currently estimated at £17 million, which could rise to £24 million - attracted more attention among the critics of tribunals and opponents of accountability than the scandals it examined or the failure to react to its disclosures.
As the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Jim Mitchell, one of its members, Mr Pat Rabbitte, and its most forthright witness, Mr Desmond O'Malley, recalled this week, a great deal seemed obvious in 1994.
For instance, the Department of Agriculture had competing functions: one to promote the industry; the other to regulate it, especially in the case of EU schemes whose funds were largely payable to the beef processors.
It was an anomalous state of affairs. For some strange reason it still is. Even when the Fine Gael-led government decided in 1996 that the roles should be separated it didn't happen.
The secretary-general of the Department says the separation will occur. Shortly.
Mr Mitchell pointed to a list compiled from reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General: it appeared there had been 49 complaints of waste, maladministration and inefficiency in the Department since 1990. But in some cases those responsible for mistakes had been promoted.
In several respects little has changed since the parliamentary ructions which preceded the tribunal when Mr Charles Haughey felt he could safely accuse Mr Barry Desmond of national sabotage, and Mr Larry Goodman said Mr Desmond was anti-bloody everything.
Mr Joe Walsh, who was minister of State at the Department when the tribunal was set up and Minister for Agriculture when it reported, is Minister still.
The same people are at the heart and head of the beef industry; Mr Goodman among them, restored to his position as one of the most powerful and influential beef processors in the EU. (An attempt to have him lead a committee on the future of the industry just failed.)
Fianna Fail, of course, has been good to Mr Goodman. One of the questions which wasn't answered by the tribunal was to what extent Mr Goodman had been good to Fianna Fail.
Other inquiries have underlined the pertinence of a question to which the Hamilton report devoted two paragraphs and an acknowledgment of the beef industry's "normal contributions" to parties.
The processors, their interests and relations with State and EU agencies are once more of crucial importance as the deepening difficulties of farmers lead again to reliance on intervention.
Mr Walsh and his officials must guard against the resumption of practices which damage our reputation in the EU and add to the bills of taxpayers at home and abroad.
Ministers and officials may avert their eyes (and do); but EU meters tick up the costs: nearly £300 million in shortfalls on FEOGA schemes for which the Department is agent; £96 million in disallowances (or fines) for fraud; £32 million for a meat plant burned down but uninsured - £430 million all told.
SMALL beer, you may be tempted to think, when those in charge of the State's finances discover that we're £750 million better off than they thought and the discrepancy is happily brushed aside.
Not quite so small, when you hear a negotiator on the Government's behalf tot up the nurses' demands and say that £200 million (a figure the unions dispute) is outlandish.
Of course, it's outlandish, though not in the sense he had in mind: it's half the cost of the avoidable, culpable, scandalous shenanigans in the beef industry.
Mr Rabbitte commented on Fianna Fail's reaction to the current tribunals, Flood and Moriarty, in the December issue of Magill: "The past is a foreign country unfortunately being excavated at Dublin Castle. The future is a promised land of ethical politics."
The jibe was at Mr Ahern's expense; specifically at the Taoiseach's third - though probably not final - announcement of his intention to introduce new and improved standards in public life.
According to Mr Rabbitte, in the new dispensation "membership of Fianna Fail at parliamentary level will only be open to the fittest, who will have hurdles to overcome reminiscent of Finn McCool's tests for membership of the ancient Fianna".
Fianna Fail people complain that the media - and Mr Rabbitte - take pleasure in their discomfiture at the excavations in the Castle and at Mr Ahern's attempts to avoid the deadly embrace of Mr Haughey, Mr Ray Burke and their well-heeled connections.
But the only funny thing about the affairs that new, improved Fianna Fail would prefer to forget is the way in which the party keeps tripping itself up whenever it tries to escape them. The latest example was at the Public Accounts Committee.
When FF members discovered that Mr O'Malley was being called to give evidence, they held up proceedings for half-an-hour with complaints, asking who'd invited him and why.
Then, with the confidence of the well-informed, Ms Beverly Cooper-Flynn, Mr Sean Doherty and their colleagues trooped off, leaving the questioning of witnesses to Mr Conor Lenihan.
At least, as he left, Mr Doherty showed he remembered what Mr O'Malley knew about the industry.
"I suppose we'd better go for the posters," he said: the PD man's appearance before Mr Justice Hamilton ended in an election.