As we go to press Justice Mahon and the Irish Times, aided by the Daily Mail, are trying to change the outcome of the General Election after the Election, by means of an intensified libel campaign against the Fianna Fail leader, who, by any reasonable standard, won the election.

Justice Mahon is a would-be tax cheat who had to disgorge £20,000 in 1992 and blames the late Fianna Fail TD, Liam Lawlor, for revealing this fact to the media. He launched an assault on the Taoiseach the first day of Tribunal business after the Election. He had nothing new—or nothing of substance—to do it with, but he knew that the assault would not be looked at critically by the media. His problem is, that, after years have gone by and millions have been spent, he has come up with nothing on which charges can be based against anybody, and he is taking it personally and has resorted to dirty tricks. We will not speculate on whether this arises from political bias or sheer inadequacy.

In view of the happenings of the last couple of months, the Mahon Tribunal and the Irish Times must be regarded as a combination.

The Fine Gael leader has responded to the encouragement given to him by the spurious Tribunal and the Oath-bound British newspaper by refusing to concede that he lost the Election. He says he can form a rag-bag Coalition of bits and pieces, even though it is obvious that, in order to do this, he must either join forces with Provisional Sinn Fein—or, if his Stickie partners baulk at this, he must mend his fences with Lowry and pay a million and a half pounds to Beverley Cooper-Flynn so that she can clear her debts to RTE over the libel action. And this supposes that she and other Independents would be willing to make nonsense of themselves by supporting him.

The fact that Lowry and Beverley Cooper-Flynn were poll-toppers shows how much credence the electorate places in the "corruption" indictments concocted by a few powerful people in Dublin for reasons which have nothing to do with good government.

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