A whiter than white O'Malley won't wash

Some of the central questions concerning Des O'Malley's role in the 1970 Arms Crisis were avoided in Sunday's RTE programme. The avoidance of these central questions raises doubts about the judgment and agenda of the programme-makers and about whether the three hours to follow should be permitted by RTE.

The questions that should have been asked concern a meeting Des O'Malley had with Charles Haughey on September 9th, 1970, less than two weeks before the start of the Arms Trial. The questions are simple:

1. Why did you, as minister for justice, agree to meet Mr Haughey secretly, a defendant in the Arms Trial about to happen less than two weeks afterwards?

2. Why did you convey a request from Mr Haughey as to whether a witness in the Arms Trial, Peter Berry, then secretary in the Department of Justice, could be "induced" or "directed" or "intimidated" into not giving evidence or changing his evidence, as outlined in the Berry papers?

3. If you had no intention of being a conduit between Mr Haughey and Mr Berry, why did you tell Mr Berry what Mr Haughey had asked you to convey?

4. If your participation in that meeting was innocent, why did you not inform the Garda and/or the attorney general about what had happened, since it might have been that a separate crime had been perpetrated by the request made of you by Mr Haughey?

5. Why did you not inform the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, of the meeting, either before the meeting or immediately afterwards or any time afterwards?

Maybe Mr O'Malley has simple answers to these questions. Perhaps he would say the meeting never took place. If so why did he confirm to his biographer, Dick Walsh, that it did? Maybe he would say that while the meeting did take place, Peter Berry's version of what transpired is wrong and that nothing of the kind suggested by Mr Berry occurred. If so, why did he not say this in 1980 when Mr Berry's version of that meeting first came into the public domain, since the significance of Mr Berry's version is so serious for him (Mr O'Malley)? And if the meeting was not about getting Mr Berry to change his evidence, what was it about?

If he were now to claim that he did tell Mr Lynch of the meeting, then how is it that in the Dail in November 1980 Mr Lynch stated that the first he knew of the meeting was when he read Mr Berry's account of it? Mr Berry clearly believed that, at the time, Mr O'Malley was trying to curry favour with Mr Haughey. If that were so, it would cast Mr O'Malley's role in the Arms Trial affair into a very different perspective.

Now how is it that this issue, a central issue if not the central issue in any evaluation of Mr O'Malley's role in the Arms Crisis, gets avoided? Could it be because it would make the hero-worship conveyed by the programme appear ridiculous? Or, worst of all, would it complicate the central message that there was in 1970 an attempt to plunge the country into sectarian warfare and that only Des O'Malley and his friends saved the country from that debacle? (This is an agenda that has been run for 30 years by a faction in RTE).

Like everyone, Des O'Malley has done things he could not be proud of. That does not make him a bad person, still less an evil one. Any audit of his career would place on the debit side that September 9th, 1970, meeting with Mr Haughey and his subsequent failure to inform the attorney general and the Taoiseach.

ALSO on the debit side would be his sectarian opposition to liberalising the laws on contraception and divorce in the 1970s. In addition, there is his central role in the disastrous management of the economy from 1977 to 1979 and his passivity in the face of Mr Haughey's further depredations on the economic front. Also, he never inquired of Mr Haughey where he got his wealth from.

There was his opportunistic support for Barrington's Hospital in the late 1980s at a time of economic cuts: he was prepared to support cuts anywhere but in his own bailiwick. And, finally, there was his part in driving the political culture here away from concern with equality.

There is a substantial record on the credit side. He was outstanding in his opposition to the government's involvement in Bula in 1976. He was a formidable presence in the Department of Industry and Commerce and he was dogged and right in his exposure of the export credit insurance scam.

He has been courageous and relentless in the exposure of corporate crime and he has also been right on the North over the last 15 years (much later than many others such as Garret FitzGerald and Conor Cruise O'Brien, but well ahead of most). He discarded the sectarian baggage and was an important advocate of a pluralist Ireland.

And he has been a nice man (in spite of the truculence) and, on balance, an honourable and honest man. He will hate the qualification to the latter, but isn't that as much as any of us can aspire to? It is a pity this TV series has started off pretending he is what he is not.