Unable to see good from bad

The media's triumphal feeding on the jailing of Ray Burke has been nauseous, for often it was this same media and often these same journalists who deferred, bowed and scraped before Ray Burke when he was somebody, yet who now crow over his humiliation.

Never once did any of these challenge him when he was a powerful minister on the issues we knew at the time to surround him. How many of the journalists who are gleeful about his misfortune now ever asked him a direct question about planning in north Dublin when he was a minister?

It is the same now. Bertie Ahern is unchallenged on the obvious questions that arise concerning him and Ray Burke. It's hands-off time again. Never take on the powerful, at least not until they have been felled by someone else. And then never let up on the one who has been felled.

Ray Burke did many good things as minister. One of those reflects unfavourably on one of those quoted repeatedly in the last week as questioning his fitness for office 10 years ago - Albert Reynolds.

Albert Reynolds, while minister for industry and commerce during 1987 and 1988, managed the infamous export credit insurance scheme in relation to the export of beef to Iraq. The manner in which this was handled was curious. A massive favour was afforded to the Goodman organisation and, it transpired, without any reciprocal benefit to the Irish economy, because the beef which was being exported under this scheme was being taken from EU intervention stocks.

Albert Reynolds has always claimed that he did not know this at the time and, had he known it, he would have stopped it. But he has never been challenged on how he did not know it, since there is evidence that he was explicitly informed about it at the time.

Let's be fair and clear here. I am not alleging impropriety on the part of Albert Reynolds on this score. I am just recording that there are grounds on which to challenge his claim not to have known that the beef was taken from intervention.

Now when Ray Burke succeeded Albert Reynolds as minister for industry and commerce - this was when Albert was made minister for finance, when Ray MacSharry was made EU commissioner - Ray Burke stopped the favouritism to the Goodman group and radically changed the manner in which the export credit insurance scheme was operated.

So here was an instance where the "disgraced" and "corrupt" Ray Burke cleaned up a mess left by Albert Reynolds, someone whose words of excoriation of Burke are now leapt upon as further "proof" of Ray Burke's perfidy.

And when Ray Burke went before the beef tribunal to account for his stewardship of the scheme, he told the truth, the full truth, much to the great annoyance of Albert Reynolds. Indeed, readers may recall that, in the midst of Ray Burke's testimony, the then attorney general, Harry Whelehan, serving under Albert Reynolds, then taoiseach, rushed to the High Court for an order to prevent Burke telling the tribunal any more about decisions taken in cabinet when Albert had been handling the export credit insurance scheme.

And, by the way, Ray Burke's intervention to stop the favouritism to the Goodman organisation took place when Charles Haughey was taoiseach. Odd, isn't it, that the "corrupt" former minister, serving under the "disgraced" former taoiseach, should have intervened to clean up the act of the much-honoured and revered Albert. Not that Albert should not be honoured for the manner in which he built on the peace process initiated by his predecessor, the same "disgraced" former taoiseach.

Does anybody want to remember any of this? Does anyone want to remember that the minister for justice who had the guts to take on the issue of the reform of the laws governing homosexuality was Ray Burke, an initiative later followed through on by his successor in justice, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, for which she has taken most credit?

There is a terrible atavism at large, a frenzy almost to inflict humiliation and suffering on those we selectively perceive as having caused harm.

Some years ago, in these columns, I wrote of the Lord's Prayer, about which I have many misgivings, and over the expression of those misgivings I got into a lot of trouble. I do not want to bring that trouble on myself again, not right now anyway. Instead, I want to repeat an uncontroversial point I made then about that prayer. There is in it a very powerful challenge by which I assumed all Christians might like to be judged, and it is in the line "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us".

Does the milk of forgiveness ever flow through our public veins now? Yes, of course, Ray Burke did wrong. But, in seeing that, must we be blind to the good he did; to the reality that he, like the rest of us, is a mixture of good and bad; and that, as a human being, he is entitled to our forgiveness as we seek the forgiveness of others?