IT'Sbeen said before but there is no harm in mentioning it again - politics in Northern Ireland is consistently, unacceptably unaccountable.
The allegations contained in last week's BBC Spotlight into the sale of the Nama property portfolio could have ended the careers of a number of people had this been a normal functioning democracy and not a two party carve up.
Instead a former DUP finance minister told this paper he didn't even bother watching it.
The scandal over the sale of the Project Eagle property portfolio shows no sign of fading.
In fact calls for an all island inquiry have now built up a head of steam, with even Enda Kenny - who previously said there was no need for such an investigation - joining in the calls for a cross border probe.
It's worth casting your mind back to last year when Mick Wallace, the unlikely hero of this piece, first used Dáil privilege to make the claims that millions had been siphoned off the top of the Project Eagle sale and stored in an off shore bank account to pay off 'fixers' including, he claimed, a Northern Ireland politician.
It remains a source of great pride that I work for a newspaper that refused to let those allegations of corruption go unchecked and my colleagues Brendan Hughes, John Manley, Gary McDonald and Susan Thompson kept digging and chipping away at a story many people did not want told.
In the Republic it took the wild haired Mick Wallace to shake a few trees. In the north it was an even more unlikely character, Jamie Bryson, who kicked the establishment doors in.
With scant regard for the laws of libel and safe in the knowledge that it's futile to sue a man with no money, he threw information on a blog that has almost all been shown to be accurate.
A future debate on libel reform must take into account the impact the internet and the freedom to self publish has had on laws of defamation and how best those laws can he changed and adapted to reflect that changing landscape.
The unchecked and impossible to police nature of the internet means that nonsense and misinformation can be scattered like cluster bombs from anonymous sources. I despair at times at the absolutely inane and mindless nonsense that passes through my Twitter timeline, but it can also be a very freeing medium as the Nama scandal has shown.
What the combination of two prominent whistleblowers and some diligent journalists and brave editors have achieved would put current Stormont and Dáil investigations to shame.
Investigative journalism is alive and well and has shown its worth in this particular scandal.
And yet Sammy Wilson attacked the award winning BBC Spotlight programme, calling them 'biased bigots'.
His clumsy attempt to 'shoot the messenger' in order to shut down debate hasn't worked.
Just this week the chairman of the Dáil public spending watchdog said they would be asking members of the Stormont finance committee to travel to Dublin to help TDs grill Nama officials.
This is an unprecedented step and a giant leap at finally getting to the truth of the sale of the Northern Ireland property portfolio.
Would that have happened had a handful of journalists not continued to push and probe at the Nama issue and shame the politicians into action?
I very much doubt it.
To date the scandal and allegations of cronyism, financial wrongdoing, political interference and short changing the Irish taxpayer out of potentially billions of pounds have claimed only one scalp.
Ironically, former Sinn Féin MLA Daithí McKay is now the only person to emerge from this ongoing scandal with any backbone, he at least had the decency to admit wrongdoing in coaching a witness and resign.
Something very rare in Northern Ireland politics.
Meanwhile, we are left with members of the DUP behaving like Teflon Dons and refusing to answer questions on what role they played if any in lobbying in the run up to the property sale or accept any responsibility for the appointment of buddy Frank Cushnahan to the Nama advisory committee. The man now reported to the gardaí and Britain's National Crime Agency after being recorded getting brown envelopes of cash in return for promises to talk to his mate Sammy Wilson and Peter Robinson, although he denies any wrongdoing.
Nama really is the first real test of Stormont's new opposition. It's time for the parties outside of the executive to do their job and push for some much needed accountability.
