Perhaps, after all, what the tribunals need is a little more, rather than less, investment of taxpayers' money.
I have in mind a new position - that of tribunal dramaturge, a person who, for a hundred grand a year, would bring sense to what is happening.
I forget how long the Mahon tribunal has been running. Before it was called "The Mahon tribunal", it used to be "The Flood tribunal", and before that, I think, "The Brian Boru tribunal". The longevity of tribunals, it seems, is something we're prepared to live with, perhaps even to be reincarnated to, at least once or twice. This is not necessarily a problem, since by now it is generally agreed that the point of the tribunals is to entertain the public.
Coronation Street, after all, has been running for over 40 years, almost half the life of the Beef tribunal.
The difficulty, however, can be perceived by pursuing this comparison. If, one evening, the viewers of Coronation Street were to be taxed by the sudden appearance of Len Fairclough or Stanley Ogden, I think it reasonable to anticipate confusion.
Even those old enough to recognise the character would be discomfited by the insult to coherence.
Tribunal-watchers, however, are expected to retain a memory of a character's significance and yet be untroubled by the fact that he or she may never reappear.
For the past five years, the Irish public has had to hold in its imagination the significance of reported encounters between Tom Gilmartin and Pádraig Flynn, but only in the past week have these long-promised sequences hit the screens. In a few days, both characters will disappear again, leaving the viewer bereft as to the meaning of it all. In another decade or two, the two men may reappear, bearded and frail, to add another "module" to our understanding of things, but this is not guaranteed.
If the Mahon tribunal were a movie, most people would have walked out long ago. It is poorly scripted, lacks narrative coherence, and has no underlying philosophy concerning consequences of actions.
Liam Lawlor going to jail was more an illustration of the impotence of the tribunal than anything else, since he was imprisoned not as a consequence of something he'd done but for his failure to co-operate, and, even in the hour of his incarceration, conveyed to the world that, if you can walk through the gates of Mountjoy with a grin on your face, there is very little the legal system can do to you.
I sense there is by now a tacit understanding between politicians, the media, the legal profession and the many actors playing their cracked acting roles in these productions, that the whole point is to put on a show. Perhaps the idea that this was about getting to some essential form of truth about the abuse of the political process is one that only a few literal-minded souls out there are still clinging to. For justice to function, it is not sufficient merely for it to be done and for its execution to be observed - the process should also have about itself the sense of a story being told.
A trial is not merely a legal procedure; it is also a narrative concerned with actions and consequences, beginning with the story being told and ending with the judgment of the court.
Thus, the observer is enabled to comprehend the consequences in terms of the meaning of the relevant deeds, just as the end of a movie makes sense of everything that has gone before.
But, with the tribunals, there is no evidence of script and very little of plot. Characters come and go, but with no sense that either their innocence or guilt has any particular significance.
They may return or they may not. Has Gogarty been killed off? Will Dunlop sing again? Will Pee recover his memory?
The problem is that we may all be shoving up supermarkets by the time these questions are next addressed.
Tribunals are actually more like cartoons than movies, and most of the players intuitively grasp this. Cartoons are characterised by maximum activity devoid of consequences. Character plunge to certain death, hit the ground at the speed of light, pass through the Earth's core and emerge on the other side unscathed. Similarly tribunals.
I was reflecting last week on how superbly Dermot Morgan had captured the Flynns when it occurred to me that I might be seeing things the wrong way around.
What if it was that the Flynns, perceiving the benefits of a public life lived as cartoon, had begun to reinvent themselves as The Flynnstones? Hence, they smile, smirk, grin and joke their way through what we are supposed to take as sombre legal proceedings. The charge-sheet suggests gravity, but their demeanour says, "ha-ha". The demeanour of the witnesses, their almost caricatured appearance, fixed smiles and ridiculous answers suggest that it is really, after all, just an episode of The Flynnstones.
But at least their scripts are well-written and appropriately implausible.