The self-righteous have had a wonderful week. Michael McDowell, the bête noir of Ireland’s left-leaning, Provo-cuddling media establishment, opened himself to attack by apologising not once, but twice. And they seized the opportunity.

According to the once-sober Irish Independent, McDowell was sent “reeling by a double blow to his political standing”. The Irish Times denounced his “vulgar abuse and arrogant behaviour” and decided that this “tawdry episode” would “damage his image and raise questions over the credibility of his future pronouncements”.

McDowell’s crime was to react angrily to an artful interpretation of garda numbers in Dublin by Richard Bruton, Fine Gael’s deputy leader, and which was splashed on the front page of the Independent last Monday. McDowell denounced Bruton as the Josef Goebbels of Fine Gael — a phrase that in my book always meant a nasty little propagandist.

But no. McDowell had apparently called poor Bruton a Nazi. Now when that term of abuse was actually hurled at Protestants in Northern Ireland by the Irish president and a Catholic priest, the protests in the republic were muted. But McDowell’s far milder jibe was considered beyond the pale on this side of the border.

McDowell did not call Bruton a Nazi, but he still felt the need to apologise. Revealing a hitherto well-hidden soft side, McDowell confessed that he had tossed and turned all night, so deep was his upset at seeing his own anger on the television.

As dawn broke he picked up the phone and delivered a gushing apology to Bruton over the airwaves. And having caught the apology bug, he apologised to John Gormley of the Green party for previously suggesting that the people who had stoned the Progressive Democrats’ headquarters during the recent Dublin riots had been Gormley’s type of people.

It was unnerving. McDowell’s anger, his facility with words and his willingness to speak the unspeakable have been redeeming features of this government. He stands resolutely against Sinn Fein and is prepared to talk about its umbilical connection with the Provisional IRA. He faces down the trade unions in the prison service and the Garda Siochana. He willingly challenged the media consensus on the automatic right to Irish citizenship, and won a ringing endorsement from the electorate.

More than any cabinet minister he has made people aware that Sinn Fein’s leadership controls the IRA and that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are mired in mendacity. His forthrightness has helped stem Sinn Fein’s rise and has exposed the party to ridicule and suspicion.

His stance has been brave and principled, though it is more likely to attract sneers than praise from the Irish media.

Thanks to McDowell, too, the elaborate waste of money that would have been the Bertie Bowl was averted. Others led the charge, but it was McDowell’s invocation of Ceaucescu, the Romanian dictator, which made the Bowl appear as ridiculous as it was.

Of course McDowell has many faults. In the next few weeks he will publish details of a defamation bill and, as is the custom in Irish politics, it will be sandwiched by compromise. On one side there will be a privacy bill to buy the acquiescence of some cabinet colleagues, and on the other a statutorily recognised press council, because all politicians think it’s a great idea to put some manners on the media.

McDowell, who from time to time makes like a libertarian, will be the author of legislation that will eat away at basic democratic freedoms by giving the state a role in the regulation of the media and will introduce yet another layer of restraint by putting privacy laws on the statute books. It is wrong- headed, shabby and unnecessary, but we can expect him to defend the indefensible to the hilt.

McDowell can also be accused of arrogance. He is not as brilliant as he thinks (a common fault among barristers and members of the legal profession), and despite his impression of nonstop busyness, he can be slow to deliver.

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