The author and commentator Conor Cruise O'Brien has said that former taoiseach Charles Haughey should not be given a State funeral.
In an interview on TV3's The Political Party yesterday evening he also rejected suggestions that Mr Haughey had done any service to the State.
Asked whether the former taoiseach, who turned 80 last year and is suffering from prostate cancer, should get a State funeral, Dr Cruise O'Brien said: "No. But I think he almost certainly will."
Dr Cruise O'Brien, who turns 90 next year, dismissed suggestions that Mr Haughey had contributed to the State, and said any of the reforms he had introduced "were dictated to him".
"They were not his idea".
Dr Cruise O'Brien, a former diplomat, Government minister and newspaper editor, has been one of Mr Haughey's staunchest critics since the early 1980s as a newspaper columnist.
He coined the acronym "Gubu" (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented), in a column for this paper in 1982, which came to encapsulate the events during Mr Haughey's controversial second term as taoiseach, including the telephone bugging scandal.