Underlying all the fuss about alleged impropriety in the Sheedy affair is the presumption that things like this should not, and do not, usually occur. This is nonsense. This State functions yet, as it has always done, on nods and winks. The concerns of media or public about the "implications" of Hugh O'Flaherty's intervention in the Sheedy case are, therefore, bogus.
The only reason this issue is being pursued is that it provides a weapon to beat up the Government. There is nothing wrong with beating up governments, and I am not averse to it on any basis whatever; but I do insist that when we engage in this activity we at least own up to what we are doing, rather than dressing up our bloodthirstiness with cant and humbug.
Mr O'Flaherty seems like a decent man. Whether I'd think so if he had sent me down for a spell, as he did more than a few, is a moot point. Yet I believe it is important to say that what has been done to him, on both personal and professional levels, is unwarranted and wrong. He is right to suggest that nobody deserves to be treated like this.
Yet, in another sense, he shouldn't take it so personally. This isn't about Mr O'Flaherty, any more than it's about Philip Sheedy or the family he left bereft. Neither is this about making the justice system more accountable, more just or more even-handed. If the media were truly interested in injustice, not one day would pass when the daily obscenities of our family law system would not be front-page news.
Behind the closed doors of the family courts, protected from accountability to public scrutiny by the in camera rule, things happen practically every hour which make the Sheedy affair appear as the minor irregularity it was.
JUDGES in our family courts, without training, every day implement decisions which in any other arena would be regarded as major miscarriages of justice. But media are not interested in such things because their exposure might require more fundamental readjustment than the mere changing of a government. It might require the reappraisal of the entire set of ideologies which underpins the activities of media in this State. This is such an appalling vista that it is better that such injustices continue to be done, that the families and children who suffer untold pain and damage as a result of these injustices continue to suffer in silence, and that the citizens of this State continue to labour under the misapprehension that what happened in the Sheedy affair represents some kind of departure from the regulated norm, rather than that the child-snatching apparatus known as Irish family law be brought into public view.
The supposedly worst qualities displayed by Mr O'Flaherty in the Sheedy case would be as a healing balm to many of the hundreds of men who have contacted me to tell me of how their children were taken away from them in the name of Irish justice. Many of those who have lost everything dear to them, on the word perhaps of some quack masquerading as an "expert witness", would give a limb or two for the kind of humanity of which Mr O'Flaherty has been accused.
Many of them would also give a lot for a fraction of the media appetite for seeking out injustice offered as the rationale for the present crazed pursuit of one man and his family.
Heartbreakingly, as they blurt out their stories, I must tell each one of them that there is nothing I can do, that if I write one recognisable word about the horror that has befallen them we could find ourselves behind bars.
But these men expect nothing, having become accustomed to the fact that virtually all media doors in this society are closed in their faces, that the same people who now set themselves up as champions of truth and justice are the first to rubbish and condemn them on the basis of ignorance, prejudice or indifference.
ANYONE with the vaguest knowledge of the family law system in this State, or of the in camera rule which ostensibly exists to protect children but in reality functions to conceal the workings of a deeply corrupt system from public view, can only laugh long and loud at the fulminations of those who claim to be outraged by the Sheedy affair.
Justice must not only be done, they tell us, it must be seen to be done. Have these people the faintest idea what goes on in their own country? What planet are they living on that they think a quiet word in an accommodating ear, resulting in the speeding up of the dispensation of mercy, is the worst that can happen behind the many closed doors of our judicial system in AD 2000?
A rather literal-minded visitor from Mars might presume, on the basis of listening to the radio or reading the newspapers this past few weeks, that root-and-branch renewal of the Irish judicial system is now imminent. That visitor would be wrong. The current fuss is no more than virtual politics, a hologram of pseudo-truth, mock righteousness and bogus outrage on which we are invited to feast our eyes lest we notice what is really going on.
But a change is going to come. Oh, yes, it is. Denis Riordan has done this State a tremendous service, not so much by his specific intervention in the O'Flaherty nomination - no more than a battering ram to break the door down - as in that he has communicated to the subconscious of the nation that the judicial system is both suspect and susceptible to attack.
By his determination and clarity he says to all those who have been abused and discarded: do not despair, the very rottenness of the system represents the best chance of destroying it.
The only worthwhile thing to emerge from this whole saga is that Mr Riordan is now a force to be reckoned with and has planted seeds of hope in the minds of other like-minded souls.
jwaters@irish-times.ie