Kevin Myers: We know RTE allowed a tweeted lie to be broadcast about Sean Gallagher which destroyed his campaign

ONE of the special perks that we got for the €1.2bn Terminal Two at Dublin Airport is a series of 250 portrait-photographs of some famous Irish people. These public faces include Pierce Brosnan, Brian O'Driscoll, Paddy Moloney and Gerry Adams TD.

Now the last-named was at the centre of a truly atrocious war that lasted for 26 years, and cost, from all sides, nearly 4,000 lives. When Gerry Adams's IRA ceased its war, thereafter so, too, did all other terrorist campaigns, meaning that the IRA was the main engine for the Troubles. All this would be grim enough without all the other revelations of recent years, such as Mr Adams's alleged involvement in the abduction and murder of widowed mother-of-10 Jean McConville, and in the Bloody Friday bombings of 40 years ago this July. Though Mr Adams has said he was never in the IRA, and was never involved in any atrocities, not one of these very public and incredibly serious allegations in many media outlets in Ireland or Britain has ever been met with a libel writ. Now, I shouldn't even have to make these points. They should be obvious to the Dublin Airport Authority. The official image of Ireland for visitors should not include Gerry Adams. Only an utterly sick and twisted vision of this country would maintain that a picture of a grisly old warlord, whose terrorist-followers had directly caused the deaths of nearly 2,000 people, should now be greeting tourists at Dublin Airport. But that is what the peace process has done: it has created a level playing field of utter depravity, in which the doer and the done-unto are, as we have repeatedly seen, accorded the same moral status: though in the case of the DAA, the victims of IRA death-squads are happily invisible.

It is surely not coincidental that another semi-state organisation, RTE, was responsible for perpetrating a Sinn Fein wheeze that has had profound constitutional implications: the corruption of the presidential election. We know beyond all doubt that RTE allowed a tweeted lie to be broadcast about Sean Gallagher which destroyed his presidential campaign when he was ahead in the polls. And we can be pretty sure that an unsubstantiated tweet from a Catholic organisation, such as Opus Dei or the Knights of St Columbanus, would never have been broadcast by RTE as a "fact". And as sinister as this outrage has been the utter lack of media anger about the corruption of our democracy. The logic apparently is that the outcome justifies the means. We have a liberal and cultured president: so that is all right then.