Everybody makes mistakes. The better you are at what you do, the bigger the mistake you stand to make. For people at the top of their profession, one wrong move can be enough to knock you off your perch, because plenty of people are waiting to take your place.
Mr Hugh O'Flaherty's "unwise and inappropriate" actions created a vacancy in the Supreme Court which had knock-on effects all the way down through the judicial system. His resignation took a top candidate out of the field for Chief Justice and disturbed the delicate political balance of power within the judiciary that keeps the State on some sort of reasonable plane.
If you understand the Hugh O'Flaherty debacle in that context, he becomes a victim of professional rivalry whose opponents played dirty and created a punishment out of kilter with his original error. In that case, he deserves a second chance. That seems the argument Messrs Ahern and McCreevy use to justify their securing him a major international appointment only one year after their own Government had been set to impeach him.
You can imagine how deeply it touches Mr McCreevy, who spent years as a backbencher because he took a stand against Charles J. Haughey. People who should have supported him then did not: with McCreevy out of the running for a cabinet post, their own chances of preferment were better.
That, however, was nearly 20 years ago. The context McCreevy operates in has changed, but he seems not to know it. In his wish to be fair to O'Flaherty, he has recklessly exposed himself and his colleagues to the same kind of charges on which he took his original stand against Haughey. He is fighting a battle he thinks is for O'Flaherty when it is more like what he needed someone to fight for him back in the 1980s.
The tragedy of McCreevy is that he is taking on the Haughey mantle, by indulging some of the characteristics he used to despise. Haughey's penchant for appearing to pander to public opinion while having his own majestic way is transformed by McCreevy into a determination to do it all his way, no matter what people think.
Like Haughey, McCreevy is promoting the view that the little man really doesn't matter, when the rights of the little man were what gave him his integrity in the first place. The Lone Ranger mindset that stood the electorate so well when he was a backbencher blinds him to the implications for democracy of creating an impression that the jobs still belong to the boys, and will be given to them behind closed doors.
His princely dismissal of public concern in his Dail speech this week was a piece of rhetoric straight out of the Haughey textbook, replete with spin, self-aggrandisement and an economic use of both language and fact. The result is a display of contempt for the processes and institutions of the State, and for his own colleagues' reputations, as blatant as Haughey might have done.
McCreevy the private person may not have agreed with the Chief Justice's report on the O'Flaherty affair; McCreevy the Minister for Finance is obliged to show respect for it. McCreevy the person can congratulate himself on getting his ministerial colleagues to agree with him one by one rather than raising O'Flaherty's appointment at Cabinet. But the Minister is smart enough to know that although this classic piece of manipulation is how any decent board member gets a potentially challenging decision through, it really isn't kosher to involve your Cabinet colleagues in what seems like a personal crusade.
It took McCreevy years to climb back into the top political ranks. Unfair and unfounded rumours were circulated about him in political and accountancy circles in an attempt to intimidate him, and they failed to do so. But the battleground has changed, and McCreevy is now a main player. He seems to think he is still the representative of the little man.
It has taken O'Flaherty, however, only one year to re-enter the public arena, and on better financial terms than the salaried post of Chief Justice. Everything about it is exceptional. O'Flaherty's re-entry is operatic in its speed, with no period of rehabilitation doing small works in the public good.
Questions that might have been answered about exactly why he became involved in the Sheedy affair are again urgent. Why intervene on behalf of one neighbour's request, as opposed to any other's? Why meet court registrar Michael Quinlan in chambers, thus invoking all the moral authority of the office?
The Chief Justice's report questioned O'Flaherty's judgment. But O'Flaherty's readiness to accept the European Investment Bank job raises deeper queries. Does he share McCreevy's evident view that the report is no disbarment to high office? Is he willing to stand by while public confidence in the judicial and political processes erodes further as a result of his appointment?
Beyond it all is the great tragedy of the late Anne Ryan's family, of children left without a mother, parents without a daughter, a husband deprived of his wife. Her grieving father told Marian Finucane of how he had worked for 30 years in CIE and received a minimum pension in return, with no favours done for his years of service. You have to ask why it is appropriate to reward one man's loss over another's, when their relative pain is wholly incomparable. You have to ask why the little man is expected to live by the rules, when they are bent at will for others.
Hugh O'Flaherty is not responsible for the Ryan tragedy, or for McCreevy's inappropriate identification with his case. Yet there is something deeply disturbing when a former Supreme Court judge is willing to countenance damage to his own profession, and the State he worked hard to support, for the sake of a well-paying job.
mruane@irish-times.ie