The former Fianna Fail minister, Mr Ray Burke, along with those wealthy individuals who made corrupt payments to him and who lied to and obstructed the Flood Tribunal, must suffer the full rigours of the law.
Unless our increasingly wealthy society becomes convinced that white-collar criminals will automatically join their working-class counterparts in jail, we will invite the spread of corruption. Already, international business surveys are charting a fall in Ireland's rating for honesty. That rot must be stopped. And the publication of an interim report from the Flood Tribunal into planning and other matters offers an opportunity to do so.
Mr Justice Flood spent five years examining allegations of corruption against Mr Burke and other politicians and has published a damning interim report. The fiction of "political donations", created to explain an estimated £200,000 given to Mr Burke by builders and businessmen over a period of three decades, was swept aside. These were categorised as "corrupt payments" designed to influence the then minister's political actions in favour of the donors. From the time Mr Burke corruptly acquired his home in North County Dublin from Oakpark Developments in 1973, he was in regular receipt of payments from builders Brennan and McGowan. And he was found to have taken a corrupt payment from Mr Oliver Barry in order to influence his ministerial attitude towards Century Radio.
The Director of Public Prosecutions will be expected to initiate criminal proceedings arising from this report. Charges of making and receiving corrupt payments will be investigated by the Garda Siochána. In that regard, a failure by the tribunal to identify specific planning decisions taken as a result of payments may pose a problem. Ministerial decisions that favoured Century Radio appear to be less opaque. Apart from those matters, some key witnesses could be prosecuted for hindering the tribunal's work .
Attempts to prosecute the former Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, for lying to the McCracken Tribunal and hindering its work collapsed some years ago following injudicious public comments by the Tánaiste, Ms Harney. On this occasion, it is important that the coming Dáil debate on the Flood report should be cool and measured, so that Mr Burke and others cannot claim their rights to fair trials have been compromised. Whatever about successful criminal prosecutions, it is imperative that the legal costs of those who lied to and obstructed the Flood Tribunal should not be borne by the State.
In all of this, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has sought to evade responsibility for promoting Mr Burke to the senior Government position of Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1997, in spite of the allegations against him. In his defence, the Taoiseach claims to have established the Flood Tribunal. In truth the Dáil, in the teeth of Government resistance, founded the tribunal.