Is the Frank Connolly affair over? If so, what did it signify? Who won? Who lost? Who should celebrate and who lament? These questions go deeper than they appear to, touching on the health of the culture of our public life.
So far, my hand yet undeclared, I could come down on either side. But for how long can I proceed on the same basis, without declaring for Connolly or McDowell, thus exposing the colour of my shirt? With the public culture landmined by 35 years of conflict, it seems impossible to make any clear statement about all this without extending comfort to one or other side on the basis of what will read as a predisposition.
A dozen years into the "peace process", we have yet to comprehend the full debilitating effects of the Troubles on the culture of this Republic. The Connolly affair showed that it is still not possible to discuss, in a neutral, objective, even-handed way, issues relating to justice, rule of law, due process or fairness, once there is any hint of a republican dimension.
Immediately, the field breaks down into Provos and Others, and the issue becomes not so much rights, wrongs or even facts, but Where You Stand.
To speak of the Minister's actions as having implications for civil liberties is to reveal the tail of one's green shirt. To defend Michael McDowell's role in defending the State from subversion is to expose one's anti-republican sympathies and to appear willing to sacrifice the letter of the law in the interests of discomfiting the IRA.
Minus the republican subtext, it seems obvious that what Michael McDowell did was as dubious as it was unprecedented. To hide behind Dáil privilege to attack an individual was startling, but might have seemed legitimate if the Minister had advanced a definitively persuasive case against Connolly. To leak the content of a police file by means of a mate in the media was the act of a political bootboy. If the subject of such selective revelations had been, for example, even an "ordinary decent criminal", the Minister would surely have had to resign, not least because the "evidence" on offer fell short of any standard of proof, and because the leak had rendered a future prosecution all but impossible.
But even to make such observations is, in this skewed culture, to seem to take the side of Frank Connolly. Because of the undertones of paramilitarism, Michael McDowell has been able to don the cloak of the public interest and rely on the widespread public repudiation of the Provisionals to get himself off any hook he appeared to be on. By now, I, too, appear to have shown my hand.
Well, no. As a matter of fact, I would welcome the closure of the Centre for Public Inquiry. The idea of a foreign "philanthropist" sticking his nose and his dollars into the affairs of a sovereign nation, as Chuck Feeney has done in funding the centre, is to my mind deeply unhealthy. If Mr Feeney wished to fund Frank Connolly in his investigative efforts, he might more properly have financed a newspaper or magazine to take its place in the marketplace of ideas, rather than instituting a watchdog body which could cloak itself in an aura of objectivity and claim a higher ground than the merely journalistic. But no matter which "side" you take, there seems no escaping the feeling that some form of subversion has already occurred here. Mr McDowell has accused Frank Connolly of subverting the State, but has not advanced any persuasive evidence of this.
Perhaps what has been subverted is the State; perhaps the law; but certainly our public culture and the sense we have of how the law and its officers and institutions should work. The office of the Minister for Justice has been subverted by virtue of the sense we are left with that at least aspects of the motivation for Michael McDowell's behaviour were more party-political than national-interest.
The standing of Michael McDowell as a political figure has been subverted by virtue of his confusing personal and political antagonisms with the interests of national security, and his use of the rhetoric of the national interest to cover actions clearly carried out in quite a different guise. And the media has been subverted by virtue of one newspaper being made a key player in the drama and used as an extra-curricular conduit for a public prosecution.
If Frank Connolly really represented a subversive threat to the State, we, the citizens of that State, may never know precisely the nature of this threat or ever feel reassured that it has been dissipated.
A cloud of innuendo has been left hanging not merely over Frank Connolly, but over the entire affair, and there now seems no way for anyone except Frank Connolly to dispel this.
And the conscience of each one of us citizens has been subverted by virtue of the impossibility of even expressing an opinion without being seen to be either a Provo sympathiser or whatever might be deemed the antithesis of that.