For All the strangeness and complexity of the events that surround the Sheedy case there is, at their heart, a familiar and simple issue: the effect of social class on equality before the law.
Far from being a sensational revelation, it has been around for the entire history of the State, and indeed long before the State was founded. Its effects have been so flagrantly obvious that we have come to take them almost for granted.
The misfortune of Judges Hugh O'Flaherty and Cyril Kelly is that they stumbled into a chain of events that dramatised the class bias of the system in a particularly spectacular way. While it is important that they should suffer the consequences of their actions, it is just as crucial that they should not be used as scapegoats for much more profound failures. If the integrity of the system of justice is to be restored, a much deeper set of reforms will be required.
To grasp the class dimension of the Sheedy case, all you have to do is to imagine an unemployed man from Ballyfermot who has been watching a Manchester United game on Sky Sports in a pub. As he leaves the pub buoyed up with euphoria and beer, he decides to take a chance and drive home.
Passing through Donnybrook, he loses control and ploughs into a young mother. She is the wife of a respected and well-connected architect. The courts are rightly outraged and he is sentenced to four years in prison.
Is it remotely conceivable in those circumstances that the chain of events that followed in the Sheedy case might occur? Might his sister, walking to the shops in Ballyfermot with her friend, happen to bump into a member of the Supreme Court?
Is it likely that her friend might know the learned judge and that a conversation about her brother's case might ensue? That the judge would take an interest in the procedural issues involved and contact the county registrar?
And, if by some freak of nature, all of these things did happen, would they result in a sudden and highly unorthodox review of the case in which another judge, relying on an apparently non-existent new psychological assessment of the guilty man, would decide to release him?
Yet, when the class positions were reversed, when the criminal was an architect and his victim a woman from Tallaght with no connections to the world of power and influence, all of these things did happen.
And what that means is precisely this: there is no equality before the law. That is why this case is so immensely serious. It is why attempts to dismiss it as, in Vincent Browne's phrase, a "tremble in a teacup", are so wide of the mark.
It is not, fundamentally, about procedural errors or poor judgment by two senior judges. It is about the undermining of one of the pillars of a democratic society.
In this context, Mr Justice O'Flaherty's actions, while they may seem much more excusable than those of Mr Justice Kelly, are actually more serious. This is partly because he is, of course, a senior member of the Supreme Court and, until the Sheedy case unfolded, a leading contender to be the next chief justice.
But it is also because of the apparently redeeming quality of his actions, their "humanitarian" motivation. No one questions the fact that he acted out of compassion for Mr Sheedy. No one suggests that he had any venal or ulterior motivation. But a judge is not paid to be a freelance humanitarian. There are circumstances in which a judge can apply his compassion and circumstances in which he cannot. Mr Justice O'Flaherty crossed the line.
The rule is quite simple: the application of the law is not impersonal, but the legal system must be. Judges have huge and legitimate scope for using their humanitarian instincts in court. No one wants a system where a judge, in sentencing a convicted person, can't take into account the fact that he or she stole a loaf of bread to feed a hungry child or was pushed into an act of violence by intolerable abuse. Rightly and properly, we don't just allow judges to apply their humanitarian instincts, we demand that they do so.
But precisely because they have so much scope for personal judgment, it is absolutely crucial that they apply it within an utterly open and completely fair framework of procedures. And that is what Mr Justice O'Flaherty patently did not do. His intervention meant that, purely because Sheedy is the sort of person whose sister might bump into a Supreme Court judge on the street, a whole new area of compassionate concern was opened up to him.
But then, this is hardly the first time that social class was a factor in the administration of justice in Ireland. It is news to no one that there is one law for the rich and well-connected and one for the poor and obscure. We know, and people like the Governor of Mountjoy Jail, John Lonergan, keep reminding us, that the prisons are places for the poor.
Even the most cursory glance at the statistics will tell you that the vast majority of prisoners come from deprived families. Most weeks, the court reports in the newspapers provide ample evidence of a huge disparity in sentencing for similar crimes. Even more fundamentally, white-collar crime such as fraud, tax evasion or corruption seldom results in prosecutions, never mind custodial sentences.
During the beef tribunal, for example, an unemployed man who stole a single container of intervention beef was sentenced to two years in prison. Respectable companies which were proved to have stolen vast amounts of intervention beef got off scot-free.
The bitter irony of the Sheedy case, indeed, is that we have been looking to the judiciary to rescue Irish democracy from a deep-seated culture of cronyism and private influence. While the church has lost its authority and faith in the political system has been eroded by scandals, the prestige of the judiciary has risen.
Judges have moved, through the proliferation of tribunals, almost to the centre of the political process. The Hamilton inquiry into the beef industry, the Finlay inquiry into the hepatitis C debacle, the McCracken inquiry into payments to politicians by Dunnes Stores, and the current Flood and Moriarty tribunals have made judges the arbiters, not just of the law, but of politics and public morality.
And the common theme of most of those inquiries has been the exercise of improper influence and the way it impinges on the equality of citizens.
Sooner or later, the way the judiciary itself protects or fails to protect that equality was bound to come under scrutiny. The principles established so brilliantly by Judge McCracken in his report that even the appearance of improper influence cannot be tolerated in a democracy have to apply to judges themselves. Making that happen in this case will be a start.
But it must not be the end of the much bigger task of making citizens truly equal before the law. Fifty years after Ireland was declared a republic, we still have to make it one.