Don't take it personally, comes the advice when acquaintances believe you are in danger of taking to heart a disappointment arising from some external force. It could be the supposedly de-personalised decision-making process at work, in law, even in sport, a rejection of some sort.

Taking things personally can make you boring, which, in many social settings, is a deadly sin. I can guarantee that a lot of people would think you boring if you took personally recent revelations of bribery and corruption in planning. You could make plain your sense of personal grievance in company, but people with grievances are very boring indeed.

Even those who looked beyond the boring might think of you as hyper-political, losing the sense of how small a player each voter is in the great affairs of state. People might suspect that you could even be a caller to a phone-in radio show.

Sure, if you were involved, double-crossed, cheated upon and "shafted", you might be permitted a personal grievance, as some of the dramatis personae in the Flood tribunal appear to have. But as an ordinary citizen? It would take an unusually acute sense of citizenship to go around expressing a personal grievance from bribery and corruption in the early nineties. "The political is personal" would be really taken to heart.

Another way of looking at these events is how they undermine the idea that each of us can progress in the world of work on the basis of merit. And that is a big personal issue for most of us.

The generation that benefited from free secondary education introduced in 1967 is now taking charge of the State. Prof Joe Lee points out that the impact of free education relied also on funding levels, which did not improve much up to 1975.

The three most powerful members of the present Government, Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy, owe their advancement not to being part of political dynasties - a form of who you are, rather than what you do - but to the political equivalent of merit alone. The same goes for John Bruton and Ruairi Quinn.

If anything introduced the expectation of advancement based on merit - to be followed imperfectly, it has to be said, by the reality - it was free secondary education.

Of course, it was never enough simply to introduce free education, as many of the educated discovered when there were no jobs in the State for them.

Free education was a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for the revolution we have seen in our economic fortunes, a matter of direct personal relevance to large numbers of us.

Most of us make a fundamental assumption that the world of work we have today is based on merit and equality. It is a violation, and a very personal one, of all we have done since the age of 12 that advancement could be based on privilege, access, the inside track or cheating.

Revelations at the Flood tribunal remind us of all the petty corruption and just plain "who-you-know-ism" that was endemic in every county of the State.

One would be naive to think there were not still stitch-ups in appointments in private and public life. The best response is not to resign oneself to cynicism, but to open more and more processes to transparent competition.

It is no accident that the sector of the economy where corruption is now being revealed is not an open, internationally competitive area where information flows fast and free. Non-traded parts of an economy, such as land, construction, and public contracts, lend themselves to the closed dealings of the village society, all the more reason to force the highest levels of free and fast information flows on them.

Some will say we were naive to believe that the State could be transformed into a society where advancement was based on merit. This scepticism is often found among those of the old-fashioned strain of the political left.

They see rigid social structures which have to be replaced, not with a fluid system where people can advance or decline in relative terms, but with other rigid structures engineered to guarantee, somehow, equality. The fact is, though, that the social revolution that people complained never happened at the time of political independence has occurred at the end of the century.

Thankfully, it has been based on merit, free advancement and an open economy, different grounds to those social revolutionaries would have foreseen or wanted.

The criminal wrong-doing of corruption is personally relevant to each citizen. Non-criminal and more widespread inside-trackism, of which corruption is a particularly malign form, is more often and more directly a personal affront to most of us. It is also deeply worth constantly struggling against, both personally and politically. If we don't have merit, we don't have a Republic or a democracy.