It was one moment of madness, a single lapse in a long career of upholding the law of the land. He had interfered in the proper punishment of a drunken driver, thus frustrating the course of justice.

Everyone who considered the case said that his actions were entirely untypical, and that he and his family had paid a very heavy price for an action from which he had derived no personal benefit.

His defenders said he was "the victim who had lost the most". Surely, it would be right to draw a line under the whole affair and give him a second chance? But the judge in the case of Garda Sgt James Cunningham, which came to court just three months before the Sheedy affair became big news, felt that the law must be upheld.

He accepted that when Sgt Cunningham had stopped a doctor from taking a urine sample from a drunken driver, he had acted on the spur of the moment. He accepted, too, that the loss of his career was already a great hardship to the sergeant and his four children, but "an attempt to pervert the course of justice was a serious matter", made all the more so by the status of the defendant as a representative of the State and the law.

A suspended prison sentence of nine months was necessary to uphold the integrity of the justice system.

The former Supreme Court judge Hugh O'Flaherty, who also interfered improperly with the case of a drunken driver, was fortunate to have, in the present Government, more merciful judges. Yet even he must have been astonished at the extraordinary rehabilitation of his reputation.

A little over a year ago, he was in disgrace and the Minister for Justice was telling the Dail of the "serious charges" that had been levelled against him by the then Chief Justice. By last Tuesday, his actions had been downgraded by Charlie McCreevy to a mere "mistake", and by Wednesday, he had become, for at least some in Fianna Fail, not a sinner to be forgiven but a saviour to be venerated.

Fianna Fail senator Camillus Glynn told the Seanad that Hugh O'Flaherty was, quite literally, a new Jesus Christ. "He has been treated disgracefully and I do not believe he did anything wrong. He compares with a similar great man, the good man from Nazareth who was crucified."

In the light of such rhetoric, merely sending Mr O'Flaherty to the European Investment Bank with 11/2 times his Supreme Court salary seemed insufficiently devout. Lavish shrines are the least of what he is due. The reality, however, is rather different. There was, indeed, a blood sacrifice but Senator Glynn picked the wrong martyr. It was not Hugh O'Flaherty who suffered to save mankind, but the Progressive Democrats who suffered to save Hugh O'Flaherty.

By going along with a gesture that can only be regarded as a deliberate reminder of the continuing impunity of the ruling elite, the party destroyed the very basis of its own existence. In a week when the decision of Des O'Malley and Mary Harney to split from Charles Haughey's Fianna Fail should be surrounded with a halo of vindication, the PDs allowed themselves to be sucked back into the political culture from which they had fled.

Mary Harney's self-confessed failure to understand how offensive the appointment of Hugh O'Flaherty to a plum job would be was in itself astonishing, but even by Wednesday, when she broke her silence on the affair, it was still possible for Mary Harney to salvage something from the debacle.

Even while accepting that the appointment would have to go ahead, she could have distanced herself from Charlie Mc Creevy's flagrant rewriting of history in his Dail defence of the appointment and at least acknowledged that Hugh O'Flaherty's actions in the Sheedy case had been both serious and wrong.

Instead, she parroted McCreevy's words about a "mistake" and "a second chance".

She must have known how disingenuous Charlie McCreevy's speech had been.

In the course of a mere five sentences, the Minister for Finance managed three times to be subtly economical with the truth of the Sheedy affair. He told the Dail for a start that "the Chief Justice, Mr Liam Hamilton, in his report on the Sheedy affair, acknowledged that Mr Justice O'Flaherty only became involved in this case in a spirit of humanitarian interest".

This is, indeed, almost a direct quote from the Hamilton report - but the key word "only" has been added to the quotation, implying, crucially, that the judge's actions in raising the Sheedy case with the Dublin County Registrar took the form merely of a humanitarian inquiry. The report, however, goes on to suggest that Mr Justice O'Flaherty must have known that the registrar would in fact act on his queries.

Charlie McCreevy continued his apparent summary of the Hamilton report with the sentence: "And yet what he [O'Flaherty] did left his motives and actions open to misinterpretation." This, again, is almost a direct quote from the report.

It is however merely one part of a sentence which carries a much more serious import than the Minister's quote suggests: "I also conclude that Mr Justice O'Flaherty's intervention was inappropriate and unwise, that it left his motives and action open to misinterpretation and that it was therefore damaging to the administration of justice."

The Minister's editing transformed a very serious lapse into a mere matter of optics.

Charlie McCreevy went on to say that, after all, Hugh O'Flaherty "did the honourable thing and resigned". Again this is literally accurate. But it leaves out the vital fact that Mr O'Flaherty resigned only after the Minister of Justice had taken the unprecedented step of informing the judge that proceedings to impeach him were about to begin. The crucial difference between a guilt-stricken decision to go quietly and resignation under threat of being ignominiously fired was glossed over in the Minister's bland formulation.

THE reality is that Hugh O'Flaherty and the other two protagonists in the Sheedy affair - Judge Cyril Kelly and County Registrar Michael Quinlan - were fortunate not to find themselves the subject of a Garda investigation. As Sgt Cunningham discovered last year, attempting to interfere with the due process of law is a "serious matter".

We know, indeed, that at an early stage in the unfolding of the Sheedy affair, a criminal investigation was actually considered.

The Department of Justice report on the scandal notes: "On March 15th 1999, the DPP phoned the Secretary General [of the Department] about the case and asked in particular whether a Garda investigation was under way. The Secretary General explained that no such investigation was under way as we had no complaint of criminal conduct. The director agreed that a criminal investigation would have been prema ture." That judgment was based on a proper reluctance to do anything which might prejudice a judicial review of the Sheedy case which was then pending.

However, the issue of a criminal investigation remained alive. On March 31st, 1999, when it was still not clear what had happened in the Sheedy case, the Minister for Justice contacted the then Attorney General David Byrne "in relation to the appropriateness of making a complaint to the Garda Siochana concerning the manner in which the Sheedy case was listed, now that the judicial review proceedings had concluded. The Attorney advised that there was not sufficient basis, at that time, to refer the matter for a criminal investigation, and that any decision whether to make a complaint to the Garda Siochana should await the outcome of the judicial and departmental inquiries."

By the time both of those inquiries were completed, however, the three protagonists in the affair had resigned and the notion of possibly referring the case to the Garda was dropped.

It may well be, of course, that a Garda investigation would not have discovered any grounds for a criminal prosecution. Not only was there no such investigation, however, but the Oireachtas Joint Committee that was meant to inquire into the affair abandoned its hearings when Hugh O'Flaherty refused to appear before it.

Mary Harney must have known, therefore, that the suggestion that Hugh O'Flaherty had been unjustly pilloried was, if anything, the opposite of the truth. Had she pointed this out, even while reluctantly supporting the appointment, Mary Harney might have put some distance between her party and Fianna Fail's breathtaking decision to endorse the culture of impunity for "people like us". Instead, she gave credence to the damning political equation that Fianna Fail plus the PDs equals Fianna Fail.

It was a sad end to a party whose primary appeal was its adamant refusal to play along with cute strokes, dodgy deals and the creepy ethos of looking after your own. If PD now stands for Play Dumb, it is difficult to see a future for the party.

If the point of the O'Flaherty appointment was for Fianna Fail to send out a message to those who might be troubled by tribunals that moral indignation is just a passing phase, the humiliation of a party which was once capable of expressing such indignation must have been a delightful bonus. Tribunals and PDs, the message said, come and go, but Fianna Fail's loyalty to the faithful will go on forever.

fotoole@irish-times.ie