When Charlie McCreevy offered to nominate Hugh O'Flaherty as vice-president of the European Investment Bank (EIB) it seemed to Mr O'Flaherty and his family as an acknowledgement by the Government that what they had done a year previously, in forcing him to resign from the Supreme Court, was wrong. What other reasonable construction could be put on the offer?
Very probably at the time he was offered the nomination, Mr O'Flaherty knew as much as the rest of us about the EIB - i.e. almost nothing. Very likely, also, he did not think through whether he or his family would like to move to Luxembourg, whether he was qualified for the position, or whether the procedure for making the appointment was proper. Almost certainly, the only significance the huge £147,000 salary had for him was that it represented the scale of the Government's climbdown.
Mr McCreevy did tell him to expect some criticism over the nomination but said it would all die down within a few days. Obviously, Mr McCreevy was wrong but he was not the only one. In writing in this column to congratulate Mr McCreevy on undoing a wrong, I too failed to appreciate the scale of public anger over the appointment. I missed the point that the size of the EIB salary seemed to most people to be an outrageous reward for someone forced out of office in apparent disgrace a year previously.
In handling the ensuing crisis, mistakes were made all round: by Bertie Ahern, by Mr O'Flaherty, by Mr McCreevy, and by Mary Harney. Mr O'Flaherty, of course, made the initial mistake by talking to Michael Quinlan, the registrar of the Circuit Criminal Court, about the Philip Sheedy case - it has been contended that he should not have talked to the couple he met on the street. But what possible harm would have been done if it had rested at that?
While talking with Mr Quinlan was ill-advised, who would have raised even the hair of an eyebrow, had it stopped there? The report conducted by the then chief justice, Liam Hamilton, found that Mr O'Flaherty's involvement in the case stopped with the query to Michael Quinlan; but in media interviews in the last few months Mr O'Flaherty seemed to acknowledge he did more than raise a query: he asked for the case to be listed.
If so, it was wrong. But had the case been handled properly thereafter, would anybody have demanded Mr O'Flaherty's resignation. It would probably have ruled him out as the next chief justice, but if that was all that had occurred, would he have been forced to resign?
The reason the affair became a scandal was because of subsequent events - in which there is no evidence of involvement by Mr O'Flaherty.
Judge Cyril Kelly disposed of the application for a review of sentence in the absence of any representative of the DPP. He also claimed, wrongly, to have seen a psychological report on Sheedy's condition and, most damningly, he suggested subsequently that the file on the case be tampered with.
If Mr O'Flaherty was involved in any of these matters, then he deserved to be removed from the Supreme Court. But there is no evidence he was. The suggestion that a remark by Mr Quinlan to a solicitor - that he (the solicitor) did not want to know why the case was being relisted - hardly constitutes evidence of Mr O'Flaherty's involvement beyond what he himself has acknowledged. It certainly does not constitute proof.
MR O'Flaherty's first mistake in the handling of the controversy was in failing to make a full public statement when the story emerged. By waiting until the publication of the Hamilton report, it was inevitable that his role would be mixed up with what happened subsequent to his involvement. His next mistake was in refusing, after his resignation, to go before an Oireachtas committee and tell all. He compounded that mistake by claiming there was a constitutional objection to his doing so, an objection which apparently did not arise when he offered to go before the same committee prior to his resignation.
He did not see that the controversy over his nomination was such that it was wrong to proceed with it - he should have withdrawn it within two weeks of accepting it and, at the same time, offered to go before an Oireachtas committee to explain his role in the affair. Neither did he recognise that Denis Riordan had a point in protesting about the closed nature of the nomination process. Mr O'Flaherty's media outings were a further disaster. He was unprepared and incapable of acquitting himself properly. Further errors were made by attacking the media, notably RTE.
Fuelling the controversy over the Sheedy affair is a sense of injustice towards the family of Anne Ryan, the woman killed in the road accident caused by Sheedy. That sense is informed by quite proper sympathy for the family. But that sentiment has perhaps clouded judgment over the proper sentence for someone involved in such an accident.
If a one-year jail term (the term he served before first being released) was not an appropriate sentence for Sheedy for drink-driving and, by accident, causing the death of a young mother, what would have been and appropriate sentence? Two, three, four years? What should the sentence have been had nobody been killed, or had he not collided with anybody but had driven the car recklessly in exactly the same way and under the influence of the same amount of alcohol? Would one year's imprisonment have seemed appropriate?
If so, why should the sentence be any different in the two cases? Why should the sentence be more when, entirely by accident, someone is killed or the sentence be any less simply because nobody is killed? The moral guilt and social recklessness is the same in both instances.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie