In all my years as a journalist, until this incredible week, there was never a time when those who plied my trade denounced the revelation of truth. Disclosure has always been the primary function of what we do.
The more information that becomes available, the more welcome it is, and from whatever source. That is the purpose of our existence; some authorising filter called "due process" was never required before we made a fact known to the public.
This apparently has now changed. Without precedent in my lifetime, and perhaps even in the history of my humble calling within any democracy anywhere, some journalists are calling for "due process" before facts are disclosed, apparently because the revelations concern a "fellow" journalist. Even more incredibly, the source of the revelations is being condemned by some in the media merely for making them, even though no one is seriously disputing their veracity.
The naked hypocrisy of this is simply astounding.
I do not regard Frank Connolly as a fellow-journalist. He is my enemy, and I his. Citing Garda intelligence, Michael McDowell has connected him to a plot by the IRA to provide Colombian guerrillas with information on the use of explosives in return for cash. This is the same Sinn Féin-IRA which in the 1980s ordered its agents to begin the long-term subversion of Irish institutions, and the secret implementation of the Sinn Féin-IRA agenda. In this task, they have also had the unwitting assistance of those useful lefty-idiots that totalitarian revolutionary movements have always manipulated in order to destroy their host-democracies.
I don't know which category journalists who (in effect) support Frank Connolly in condemning the Minister belong to: dupe or mole, either one or t'other - there is no third category.
For journalists either seek the truth or we do not; if we do not seek the truth at all times in all circumstances, if we seek to conceal it beneath the folderol of "due process" then we are betraying a cardinal rule of our trade, and we do so either because we are political comrades of Frank Connolly, or because we are voguish imbeciles. No other explanation is possible. So when you read of journalists condemning the Minister you must make your mind up: dupe or mole.
Let us now dispose of the fiction of "due process". Frank Connolly did not use such "due process" to make revelations about Ray Burke, which ultimately led to the setting up of the planning tribunal. As my splendid and indefatigable colleague Paul Cullen, neither dupe nor mole, pointed out recently, Frank Connolly's reports on Garda corruption in Co Donegal contributed to the establishment of the Morris tribunal. However, as Paul also reported, he got it spectacularly wrong when he published the false allegations of Denis "Starry" O'Brien, against whom the Taoiseach won a libel action in Dublin Circuit Civil Court in 2001. All of these allegations were based on information - some of it clearly false - which Connolly published without recourse to this mare's nest called "due process".
So why he should be given the benefit of this magical forensic device, when the victims of his disclosures were not?
And why should the Minister for Justice not make the public aware that this thing called the "Centre for Public Inquiry" into alleged corruption in Irish life is in fact headed by a man who, on the basis of Garda evidence, appears to be linked to terrorism and corruption?
To be sure, the Minister weakened his case by initially leaking information about the Connolly-Farc connection to just one newspaper.
But that aside, is it not his duty to let us know the true nature of the creature heading CPI? Is he not compelled by his high office to reveal to his fellow-citizens that this self-styled exposer of corruption travelled to the Farc-controlled region of Colombia in April 2001, along with his brother, Niall, and a convicted IRA master-bomber, Pádraig Wilson, on bogus documents?
How can any journalist seriously propose that disclosure about such matter to the democratically elected parliament of the Irish people is wrong or inappropriate, coming as it does from the Minister responsible for the maintenance of the rule of law and the very integrity of the State?
Moreover, contrary to what some cretinous (or sinisterly tendentious) observers have maintained, Sinn Féin-IRA continue to pose a threat to this Republic.
They have not abandoned the IRA's constitution, which does not recognise Dáil Éireann, and which obliges the IRA to achieve a united Ireland by force of arms. The IRA has not disbanded its units, merely disposed of some weaponry for which it has no use, but has retained some, including its AN 94s twin-shot assault rifles. Most tellingly of all, it has not surrendered the money it stole from the Northern Bank a year ago.
And now, as we have seen in recent days, agents of the IRA, aided by various witless dupes in the media and elsewhere, are effectively demanding that disclosure about anything damaging to the republican cause must be before a court of law.
Yet if that unprecedented rule applied to all news and all revelations, this newspaper would consist of blank pages.
The Minister did his job. Now it is the job of journalists to do theirs: to tell all, and stop this fifth-column bleating about "due process".