What the tribunals and journalistic revelations of recent years have not been telling us is one vital truth: it concerns the charisma, the power, the grace, and the enchantment of the central player, Charles Haughey.
I met him just the once - handshake like a dead haddock - and so cannot explain why, for so many, he possessed a magical presence that could bewitch so many people.
When historians or journalists fail, then it is time to call on the artist: for fiction liberates. It enables the writer to escape the bonds of mundane truth, and frees his imagination to create the greater truth, as Peter Cunningham has of the Haughey years in his latest novel, The Taoiseach (Hodder Headline). You can certainly enjoy The Taoiseach as a superb and dazzlingly constructed piece of fiction without knowing anything whatever about the horror that was Ireland from 1970 to the early 1990s; however, if you do know our history, then as you proceed through this book, you will find yourself in a disturbingly familiar landscape.
Only the imagination can show us pure reality. Certainly the plethora of tribunals are revealing documentary details, but at this stage in our history, we need to know more than fact. We need to know about feelings, about power, and the meaning of power; about how corruption can spread down from a single fount like champagne in a pyramid of glasses, until not a single glass is untouched by it.
The key figure in Peter Cunningham's novel is not the Taoiseach at all, but his bagman, Bunny Gardener. In the real world which this novel unnervingly reflects, like a ghastly hall of distorting mirrors, this was, of course, Des Traynor, the Mazarin-type figure to Haughey's Sun King. Indeed, we glimpse the narrative's equivalent to Haughey, Harry Messenger, only so often. Real power is like that. It is immanent; it infuses society, transmitting its will by unseen strings and undetectable forces. This is why journalism goes only so far in telling the truth about the Haughey years. Facts don't demonstrate how power works; only fiction can do that.
There are a couple of sentences in The Taoiseach which sum up the ghastly realpolitik of government at the time. The first is when Bunny's wife Adi confronts him after a friend, and a powerful figure in Irish life, has been kidnapped by the IRA. Bunny declares that Adi is simply angry with him because of the kidnap. She disputes this, replying: "I'm angry with you because you never get angry!" And of course, anger - or the complete and utter absence of it - was the key ingredient to Irish life under Haughey. None of those toadies around Haughey had the moral capacity to be angry - or if they did, they suppressed it into extinction. We learn why from Bunny's ruminations about Adi: "She would never understand, any more than would the great majority of humankind, that the retention or seizure of power is never a secondary issue." The Taoiseach is not just a novel which closely follows the appalling events that governed Irish life from the late 1960s onwards; it is an allegory of corruption, of the disease which spread throughout this country, and which is now being partly revealed - and only partly - in the tribunals. Paradoxically, that corruption spread in two opposite and supposedly contradictory directions: one into the voodoo of paramilitary purism, the other into a bonanza of institutionalised corruption.
We lived, as Bunny Gardener observes in The Taoiseach, in a shadow world, in which law and authority were adversaries, and where truth was negotiable; and Harry Messenger was popular because he was the personal embodiment of that shadow world. For the shadow world to survive, it must be populated by cowards or gullible fools, who applaud Harry Messenger even as he relieves them of their life savings. In the shadow world, it's perfectly acceptable for a republican taoiseach to be regal and polished in public and foul-mouthed and bullying in private.
It hasn't been possible to convey the world of Des Traynor/Bunny Gardener through journalism because the world he inhabited is detectable not through facts but through feel: it was a world of loyalty, of abjection, of fealty on the one hand, and kingly authority on the other. But the king Traynor served was corrupt, and he cast his corruption throughout the kingdom, spreading decay with every touch of his diseased and wretched fingers.
The insidious venality of Irish life reached grotesque paradoxes. The State armed the IRA in order to shed blood and take life, just as it ran a blood transfusion service which managed to take life by the act of giving blood.
Little wonder about the empire of corruption which lay between those two poles: the bribes, the tax-evasions, the fraudulently acquired planning permissions. Moral compromise became the defining feature of the Irish national character.
So in one sense, this instinct for the easy way, the short-cut, the deal done with a wink and a nudge, was not the invention of one single depraved man with charisma; he was simply the purest embodiment of it. We were HIV positive for decades, but it was only on his watch that we got AIDS.
Peter Cunningham's brilliant portrayal of these times would be impossible to believe if we didn't know that this week alone, Ray Burke is being dunned by the Criminal Assets Bureau for €2 million, and the wretched George Redmond is languishing in jail. True reality is only within the gift of art: and if you want to know what Ireland for so long was all about, then The Taoiseach provides the key.