Though it is his remarks on tribunals last week that have raised the ire of politicians, it is his own employer, the High Court, that has been giving the Taxing Master, James Flynn, most grief of late. Twice in the last six months, High Court judges have delivered serious rebukes to Mr Flynn. His assessments of legal costs in two highly political cases have been radically altered. In one case, his own ability to maintain the necessary appearance of objectivity has been called into question. In the other, his personal contribution to what he has called the Frankenstein of tribunals has been implicitly criticised.

Earlier this month, Mr Justice Geoghegan, reviewing Mr Flynn's refusal to grant any costs to the Workers' Party in relation to its involvement in the Prionsias de Rossa/Independent Newspapers libel trials, described comments made by Mr Flynn in the course of his initial ruling as "very unusual", unwarranted by the evidence and irrelevant to the matters before him. Though he stressed he was not implying that Mr Flynn was actually biased, his words had created an "apparent bias" and given grounds for the Workers' Party to feel that there was not "an unbiased assessment" of its claims.

More poignantly, given the current controversy, another High Court judge, Ms Justice Laffoy, effectively found last October that Mr Flynn had been substantially overgenerous in assessing costs to Mr Larry Goodman and Goodman International in relation to the beef tribunal. In spite of his robust criticisms of the cost of tribunals last week, it was Mr Flynn's own bounteous attitude towards Goodman that perhaps did most to bring the tribunal process into disrepute. In spite of many damning findings of tax evasion and crooked dealing, Goodman International was treated with what seemed to many to be extraordinary liberality.

It should be stressed that the decision to award costs to Mr Goodman and Goodman International was made by the chairman of the beef tribunal, Mr Justice Hamilton. Mr Flynn's role was to scrutinise the claims actually put in by Goodman lawyers and to decide which of them were justified. About £5 million of the claim was broadly agreed. The dispute related to the rest.

Some of the things for which Mr Flynn decided the taxpayer should pay seemed extraordinary. He allowed Goodman's solicitors to submit a claim which did not specify precise hours worked. He agreed that solicitors should be paid for reading the newspapers in order to follow coverage of the tribunal. He agreed to pay for the efforts of Goodman's PR company. He decided that the taxpayer should fork out for the lawyers' meals and for Larry Goodman's hotel bills. In all, he granted Goodman £7.3 million in costs.

Last October, Ms Justice Laffoy heard the State's appeal against the controversial parts of this award. She found, in effect, that Mr Flynn had given Goodman £1.7 million more than was justified, and cut the bill by that amount. She took over £1.2 million from the fees he had awarded to Goodman's solicitors and barristers. She threw out his decision that the taxpayer should stump up for Goodman's PR campaign or for the services of Concept Catering to the hungry lawyers.

How odd, then, that Mr Flynn should emerge last week as the scourge of tribunals and the defender of the public purse. How peculiar, too, that he should, in the course of his remarks, so wildly exaggerate the cost of the tribunals. He claimed that the cost of all the tribunals over the last decade was "hundreds of millions of pounds".

It is extremely difficult to understand where he got this figure. As of last year, for example, the amount of legal fees paid out for the beef tribunal was £13 million, though the final tally might rise to something close to £20 million. Even if that figure were to be repeated for each of the hepatitis C, McCracken, Flood and Moriarty tribunals, the figure would be vastly less than that of at least £200 million implied by Mr Flynn. In fact, however, the first two of those tribunals will have cost a fraction of what the beef tribunal did.

THE more lurid aspects of Mr Flynn's claims are even harder to understand. He spoke of tribunals having "absolute power", analogous to "the Star Chamber. . . which obtained its evidence by requiring evidence to detailed interrogatories peculiarly without the assistance of juries". He accused the Oireachtas of legitimating, by its creation of tribunals, "a system which could and did deny basic fundamental rights".

These visions of rack-and-thumbscrew interrogations in Dublin Castle are simply absurd. As a solicitor, Mr Flynn must know that the tribunals are governed by the Constitution and therefore by the Haughey rules elaborated by the Supreme Court. These rules enforce all the classic ideals of fair procedures and uphold the rights of those who appear before courts. And if Mr Flynn thinks that tribunals are peculiar in their practice of hearing witnesses without a jury, he might pay a visit to a District Court or to the Special Criminal Court.

The oddest aspect of these criticisms, indeed, is that they effectively cast aspersions on the institution of which Mr Flynn himself is an officer, the High Court. The Tribunals Acts give the chairman of a tribunal precisely the same powers as a judge in the High Court and witnesses before a tribunal precisely the same rights and privileges as witnesses before the High Court. If, moreover, a witness fails to comply with an order from a tribunal, the tribunal has to ask the High Court to enforce the order. If the tribunals are Star Chambers, therefore, so is the High Court.

The final irony of Mr Flynn's outburst is that the real questions raised by it are not about the operation of tribunals but about the operation of the office of Taxing Master. Hitherto, this office has been regarded, by those who were aware of it at all, as a quiet part of the court bureaucracy. By drawing our attention to it so colourfully and using it as a platform for public controversy, Mr Flynn has raised a fundamental question. How can someone who has expressed such passionate animosity to the tribunal process be seen to make objective assessments about the costs involved in that process?

And should the office of Taxing Master continue to be a political appointment in the first place? When introducing the Courts Act to reform the judicial system, the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, explicitly stated that "the existing arrangements whereby the Government appoint. . . the taxing masters remain unaffected" by the reforms.

At the time, that decision was uncontroversial. It seems safe to say after the past week that it would not be uncontroversial now.