It's inevitable that questions should still be raised about the Arms Crisis of 1969 and 1970. It was, beyond doubt, the most direct threat to democracy in this State in the past 50 years and led to the most serious political conflict since the Civil War.
It was also a major influence on the republican split which led to the formation of the Provisional IRA. And it contributed greatly to unionist suspicions of the Republic.
So the claims of interference with evidence in advance of two High Court trials (the first aborted) should be fully, quickly and thoroughly investigated - before a new crop of suspicion grows. And, to help the public towards an understanding of the events, the report of a Public Accounts Committee investigation into the affair should be published.
For this is a case in which you cannot say that because one side is right the other is altogether wrong. And there are those who, in the last few days, have been jumping to some dubious conclusions.
One is that, because of the questions raised by RTE's Prime Time programme, which made the claim of interference with evidence, the trials should never have taken place. Another leap by friends and allies confirms Charles Haughey in the role of martyred hero.
This is nonsense. Indeed, to lump Haughey together with the other defendants - John Kelly, James Kelly and Albert Luykx - is to miss the differences between them. The Kellys made no bones about the attempt to import arms but claimed it was being done with the authority of the State. Haughey denied hand, act or part in any such attempt.
Two questions remain: who ordered the importation and who paid for the arms?
But to jump from a claim of a doctored statement to a career blighted by conspiracies is to ignore the political context of the crisis, the information now available and the significance of the Hefferon document itself. In 1969 and 1970, two governments were attempting to run this State - the elected government of Jack Lynch and a government-within-the-government led by Haughey and Neil Blaney. The issues which divided them - and the cabinet - were the North and leadership. Haughey and Blaney, strongly supported by Kevin Boland, scorned Lynch as an outsider and, with varying degrees of intensity, dismissed his policy on the North. Lynch, by and large, followed the advice he'd been given by T.K. Whitaker a year earlier: there was no valid alternative to the policy of seeking agreement in Ireland and between Irishmen.
But when the high excitement of August 1969 surged through the Republic it gave the opportunists in the government-within-a-government the openings they'd been waiting for. A cabinet committee was formed to handle Northern affairs. Haughey and Blaney were soon in sole control of it. A fund of £100,000 was set up to relieve distress in Northern Ireland. Haughey was to administer it. Haughey and Jim Gibbons, as minister for defence, were to ensure that the Army had the equipment and other resources it needed.
It was to Blaney and Haughey that James Kelly reported, both on his contacts with Northern activists and on his arms-buying missions abroad. How much he or his superior officer, Col Michael Hefferon, told Gibbons - and to what extent Gibbons knew or approved of the arms buying - is at the core of the controversy.
If Hefferon's evidence had been doctored to remove references to Gibbons's role, it did not succeed: Hefferon was not called by the State at the second trial, but he gave evidence at the judge's invitation. And in Tom MacIntyre's sparkling account of the trials, Through the Bridewell Gate, there are numerous references to his reports to Gibbons. The first was on the meeting between James Kelly and Northern activists at Bailieborough, considered the genesis of the plan to import arms. The meeting was funded by Haughey, to whom the activists' request for arms was passed. In the same week in October 1969, Haughey summoned the British ambassador to discuss secret commitments on the Border.
Of course the question "And what would you have done in the circumstances of 1969?" is hard to answer: I was in Belfast that August and saw loyalists and B Specials attack Hooker Street and Butler Street, watched houses burn in Conway Street and felt the terror of it all.
The rational answer was not the first to spring to mind. But the irrational answers proposed by the government-within-a-government in Dublin would have made matters worse. I believe it would have been better for this country and for politics, North and South, if the divisions between the elected government and the government-within-a-government hadn't happened. But, given the inevitability of a struggle, it was fortunate the result was success for the elected government of Jack Lynch.
Had it been different, the history of the last 30 years would have been different - and almost certainly bloodier.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie