Gavan Reilly: Sorry, Judge: the ‘court of public opinion’ IS what matters here

And so it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper - and with a district court judge acquitting the alleged organisers, commenting by-the-by that some good men had lost their jobs as a result of all the furore.

You’d swear from some of the coverage in the last few days that Judge Mary Fahy had basically given some of the politicians a lollipop and a pat on the head for enduring such awful public vitriol, whipped up by a media that went delirious for the scent of blood. The weekend’s papers were full of interviews with Donie Cassidy, the president of the Oireachtas Golf Society, expressing relief at the end of an 18-month nightmare, and speculation that Dara Calleary and Jerry Buttimer would be returned to public office in short order. The cabinet and the Seanad chairmanship will both need refilling when the job of Taoiseach is rotated in December.

So little of the coverage mentioned the facts as they pertained at the time. So maybe it’s worth a little refresher course.

Judge Fahy accepted the argument that you could put a partition in a hotel function room, and turn a gathering of 80+ into two separate groupings of under 50. This meant the gathering(s) were both in keeping with the law of the land at the time. (This is pretty striking: the ‘two gatherings’ had a single common table plan, with tables numbered 1 to 10. So one room, with tables numbered 6 to 10, was a totally different gathering to the one next door with the tables numbered 1 to 5.)

But seeing the whole controversy through the lens of a criminal trial ignores what was so shocking, so plainly galling, about those events. When the story first broke, few people were complaining about possible illegality - it was the fact that the dinner took place the day after new public health rules were issued by Cabinet.

Those rules - announced in a press conference which was televised live on both RTÉ and on Virgin Media - included a limit of 15 people attending outdoor events, with sports events going behind closed doors entirely. (Remember the GAA throwing a strop at Ronan Glynn?) More pertinently, indoor gatherings were reduced to 6, with weddings the only exception allowed to remain in groups of 50. Restaurants were told they could only receive groups of 6, derived from no more than three different households.

Those rules were signed off by Cabinet on the Tuesday. The minister sent onto RTÉ’s Six One News to explain why these curbs - the first national steps backwards in the roadmap out of Covid-19 - was the Minister for Agriculture, Dara Calleary.

The same Calleary then showed up at the dinner the following night - albeit only to speak to the memory of his political master, the society’s late founder Mark Killilea - at a dinner where his Cabinet’s own advice was being ignored, on the simple pretence that the Irish Hotels Federation had yet to reissue the same advice to its own members.

Of the ten tables across those two rooms, nine had more than six people seated. The only table that kept to the rule of six - ironically, Calleary’s table 1 - was made up of people from four households.

There was no caveat in the Government announcement; no time-delayed introduction, no ‘these rules apply from Saturday’, no lead-in period. (It is precisely because of Golfgate that later restrictions were announced a few days before they kick in, giving traders time to adjust and lawyers time to draft the necessary laws.) The Government said on a Tuesday, here’s what you can’t do any more. On a Wednesday, a minister did it anyway. So did six Senators, a Supreme Court judge and a European Commissioner.

That European Commissioner’s career prospects are another topic which has been revived in the last few days; I’ve seen a revival of the old arguments that the media did Ireland a national disservice through hounding an influential Commissioner out of his job. Those arguments fail to remember the 14-day self-isolation for most people coming into Ireland, the (legal!) ban on non-essential travel in and out of Kildare, and how Phil Hogan definitely broke one and likely broke the other. They also forget that Hogan spent days trying to convince Ursula von der Leyen of his travelling bona fides, and couldn’t.

I don’t think politicians or anyone in public life is ever beyond full forgiveness. There are plenty of times where someone loses a job, does their penance, and justifies another opportunity to hold office again. Perhaps in time Dara Calleary will be back in Cabinet; Jerry Buttimer may yet become Seanad chairman; maybe Phil Hogan will return from private consultancy.

If they do, let them be judged on their positions and records. Courts get to rule on criminal law, not on public health guidelines, and certainly not on morality.