And now the scandal that the Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne bought a house from a convicted double-killer whose family associations are at the best shady. But the scandal is not from whom Pat Byrne bought the house, for it is bad enough being held to account for the sins of our fathers without also being answerable for the sins of previous home-owners; the real scandal is that the splendid fellow from whom he bought the house only served a year's imprisonment for going out with a knife and killing two men. How is that possible?
What other questions arise from this matter? That Pat Byrne paid too little for his house? Well, maybe he did - but the house was on the market for two years. Others could have done the same.
That he paid too much? Even in 1994, £90,000 was not then an eyebrow-raising amount of money to spend on a home, and certainly not for one of the most important executives in the State.
Two-tier pay structure
The issue is not Pat Byrne and his house; the issue is the two-tier Garda-pay structure which exists in this State.
For the ordinary gardai, there is an energetic trade union movement which has been able to extract from central government handsome rewards, most especially in overtime allowances, which are now an institutional curse from which there appears to be no escaping. But for the officer-class, the ordinary considerations of life seem to have been suspended: duty has been expected to take the place of financial reward for doing a job.
This state culture of duty alone does not attract (or anyway, keep for long) the ambitious, the driven, the driver of others. Duty by itself is a notoriously poor organiser of institutions. Duty is not a vector but a scalar force. It has no direction and singularity of purpose, for the question must always arise: duty to whom, or what?
And duty can cause resentment at the material rewards earned by the undutiful; then duty leads to corruption, either financial, or more often in Ireland, political. Duty can become synonymous with time-serving; duty translates into the underpaid lackey and party hack doing the bidding of his master; duty becomes an excuse for mediocrity, for failure, for well-meaning amateurism. In other words, for Plod.
Culture of Ploddery
Is it surprising that we had Plod policing for so long when the senior officers of the Garda Siochana were on Plod pay? Is it surprising that with such a culture of Ploddery on high, the force experienced so many reverses and humiliations?
Because if duty is the virtue which is sought, rather than success, efficiency or productivity, then merely a display of duty is sufficient; you cannot punish a man (or woman) for not having what you have not asked them to have.
We did not ask senior Garda officers to be good, merely dutiful: and dutiful they were. The consequences of failure were simple enough; there were none.
No one could be sacked, suspended, publicly punished. Ploddery combined with Bug gins to ensure that political servility and the inevitable consequence of the seniority system would get the "dutiful" to the top of the tree.
What is actually surprising is how well and honestly such an outmoded and essentially corruptible form of policing actually performed, and in its singularity of purpose and in its honesty, the Special Branch (and its numerous off-shoots) has performed an outstanding service to the State.
But policing is not about the shadowy world of terrorism, policing is about the visible presence of an arm of the state to protect its citizens in a complex and unpredictable society.
Huge responsibilities now fall on senior Garda officers, but the rewards are derisory. A chief superintendent in command of several hundred officers over the entire southside city centre of Dublin, from the Liffey through to Grafton Street, over Government buildings and up to St Stephen's Green, has a salary starting at just £36,404, rising over six years to £43,835.
His RUC equivalent earns one third more: and I cannot say the RUC officer is overpaid.
Pat Byrne, the most important Garda officer in the land, earns under £70,000 a year. That is absurdly little, for Garda chiefs should have big incomes and, if they want and they can afford them, large houses too. (I know what a large house is; and Pat Byrne's isn't).
Judges have large incomes - and so too have a good few journalists, though they might not thank you for saying so, and would thank you less for pointing out the vices of the former owners of those houses.
A little more vigilant
Perhaps Pat Byrne might have been a little more vigilant in inquiring into from whom he was buying the house, but the matter is barely worth a half a minute's attention before we move onto something less trivial.
Long ago, the legal profession established the rule that judges should be well-paid to protect their good name. The same is true of senior Garda officers. Their pay should be in multiples of the pay of ordinary gardai; but by that same token, they and their careers should be held accountable for their errors and the errors of their force, just like senior management anywhere. The days of Plod are over; honest and efficient Garda officers should be well paid and entitled to live in homes befitting the successful managers they are.