This Government shows it is only half committed to openness

`I had my head down," said Bertie Ahern, explaining why he hadn't noticed if Charles Haughey was given a standing ovation when he weathered a challenge to his leadership at a meeting in the early 1980s.

This was the second instalment of Gerry Gregg's series on Des O'Malley, which was broadcast on Sunday. Ahern was chief whip in the 1980s. You could see from the film why some called him the Flurry Knox of Fianna Fail.

On the day after the broadcast he was asked about the programme and O'Malley's comment that Haughey was like a cult leader. Was this how it was in the days when ministers as well as journalists feared their phones were tapped and supporters of the Boss laid into his critics in the front hall of Leinster House?

Not at all, Ahern said. Haughey - for whom, you may recall, he used to sign whole books of blank cheques - was no different from any other leader. No different, indeed, from Ahern himself. (Except that Haughey lived beyond his means - and ours - and had to depend on banks, bankers and businessmen.)

But no. Ahern said Haughey was like any other leader. Then the Taoiseach drifted off across the African Plains section of Dublin Zoo. To have another look at the unicorn, I suppose.

Bertie Ahern kept his head down in the 1980s when only a few brave souls like Mary Harney, Charlie McCreevy, Martin O'Donoghue, Mary Hanafin and Seamus Brennan had the gumption to defy Haughey in the interests of democracy and Fianna Fail.

And Bertie Ahern has been keeping his head down ever since.

His noisiest followers in the media (O'Malley's most vociferous critics) have been keeping their heads down, too, since O'Malley responded to the alarms raised by Prime Time over the Arms Crisis. Prime Time claimed that a statement by the director of intelligence, Col Michael Hefferon, would have changed the course of the Arms Trial if it had been reproduced in the book of evidence in its original form.

Indeed, the argument ran, the defendants - Capt James Kelly, John Kelly, Albert Luykx and Charles Haughey - might not have had to stand trial if the Hefferon statement had been seen to implicate the minister for defence, Jim Gibbons. (In the event the defendants were acquitted.)

O'Malley's critics immediately assumed the statement had been edited in the Department of Justice to avoid implicating Gibbons. They suggested that either O'Malley or the Department's secretary, Peter Berry, had been responsible.

O'Malley's detailed response shows that Hefferon's evidence had indeed been edited but, in accordance with the rules, by one of the prosecuting lawyers and a senior criminal solicitor from the Chief State Solicitor's Office.

It had not been edited in the Department of Justice. And the evidence of at least a dozen other witnesses in the Arms Trial had been edited in the same way. In some cases the changes had favoured the defendants, not the prosecution.

O'Malley rejects the claim that the defendants might not have had to stand trial if Hefferon's unedited statement had been available to the law officers. He says they had been arrested and charged three days before the statement was made.

He also replies to the assertion that a claim of privilege for a file on the Arms Trial was designed to prevent the disclosure of Hefferon's statement, and therefore is linked to an attempt to protect Gibbons's alleged involvement.

He says the file now contains much more than the Hefferon statement, but there was no list of contents and no way of knowing what was in it in 1970 when several other claims of privilege were prepared by the lawyers and given to him for signature.

"I am advised," he says, "that the signing of public interest immunity certificates or claims of privilege . . . was quite common at the time. The claims of privilege specifically made provision for the judge to see the documents concerned.

"It is necessary to remind ourselves that where official documents and information were concerned there was a culture of secrecy at the time which was quite different to the atmosphere of freedom of information in which we operate today."

And in this atmosphere the Government would be better employed making arrangements for a full examination of the events of 1969 and l970 than keeping its collective head down and hoping the media's interest will jump to the next sevenday wonder and the public will turn to some new diversion.

Prime Time has shown how any attempt to capture the Arms Crisis in a single programme is apt to miss both the complexity of the events and the seriousness of the threat to democracy. But it has drawn attention to both.

The Public Accounts Committee reports on the spending of £100,000 voted for the relief of distress in Northern Ireland run to 1,400 pages, and cover only the committee's open sessions. The closed sessions remain locked in the culture of secrecy.

But, as Gerry Gregg has shown, this is still a society which is only half-committed to openness. And Bertie Ahern prefers it that way.

dwalsh@irish-times.ie