What message is sent out when a senior county council engineer is suspended for seven days and reassigned to a new post after being found to have been busy making planning applications and even undertaking "unauthorised" (i.e. illegal) development?

In Britain, Mr Donal Mangan - who until this week was the town engineer and de facto planning officer of Killarney, in between all his other activities - would have been dismissed or, at the very least, would have "done the decent thing" by resigning. But not in Ireland. Though it had been known for some time that Mr Mangan was a significant property developer, the chairman of Killarney Urban District Council leaped to his defence, saying he had done a lot of good work for the tourist town by "getting rid of all the plastic shopfronts".

The Kerry county manager, Mr Martin Nolan, also publicly defended his decision to impose a seven-day suspension without pay and subsequent transfer to Tralee as an appropriate penalty for Mr Mangan's flagrant breaches of the 1984 Local Government Regulations.

These regulations prohibit local authority officials from engaging in any occupation that might represent a conflict of interest. In particular, they say that professional officers, such as engineers, architects, planners or draughtsmen, "shall not engage in private practice".

Mr Nolan, as we now know, had conducted a searching investigation into allegations of "double-jobbing" by some of his officials. This resulted in the suspension of Mr Mangan, disciplinary action against another engineer and warning notices for 24 other staff.

Few county or city managers would have trawled - as Mr Nolan did - through 4,177 planning applications lodged last year to find out how many had been made by members of their own staff. Yet they are all obliged by the 1994 Planning Regulations to do exactly that.

During the week, all 34 managers submitted reports to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, in compliance with a January 4th circular asking them to check on the situation in their areas and to confirm that no member of staff was now involved in moonlighting.

In some cases, the investigations were perfunctory, with staff being asked either verbally or in writing whether (a) they were aware of the 1984 regulations and (b) they were complying with them. Not surprisingly, the answers they elicited were in the affirmative.

Yet the regulations sit uneasily with the embedded culture of nixerism in Irish society. What's wrong, some people have been asking, with a draughtsman or an engineer helping out a relative or a neighbour by drawing up plans for a nice new bungalow?

What's wrong with Cllr Michael HealyRae railing against restrictions against housing in scenic areas and seeking to amend the Kerry county plan so that the planners would have to take a farmer's "financial need" into account in deciding whether to grant permission?

What's wrong with councillors in Meath and Wicklow rezoning large tracts of land for housing or business parks in defiance of the Strategic Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area? Surely everyone is entitled to grab a share of the capital's burgeoning sprawl?

It didn't seem to matter that the guidelines have had statutory force since January 1st. Sure, aren't most of the rules and regulations we have merely aspirational in character? That's why, for example, more than a third of on-the-spot motoring fines go unpaid and are not pursued.

It also explains why many motorists still have little hesitation driving down Dublin's South Great George's Street on a new bus lane and making a banned rightturn into Dame Street, blithely ignoring the signs that say this option is only available now to buses, taxis, cycles and motorcycles.

If there isn't a garda on duty, they take the chance - just as many of them do every day in sailing through red lights at the same junction and forcing pedestrians to stand back. But then, aren't gardai themselves parking illegally three abreast in Pearse Street?

AND wasn't Padraig Flynn only helping out a former constituent in 1993 when he wrote a letter from his EU Commission office in Brussels saying he was "looking after the rates, medical cards and service charges"? Or was he keeping his hand in, for the sake of his daughter?

Beverly Cooper-Flynn, who succeeded to his Mayo West seat in 1994, had no problem when she was a senior official in National Irish Bank advising customers with wads of cash to evade tax by lodging it offshore. She only had a problem when this was revealed by RTE.

Similarly, Denis Foley TD sat through the Dail Public Accounts Committee inquiry into deposit interest retention tax (DIRT) evasion even though he himself was an Ansbacher account-holder. And Liam Lawlor TD had to be forced to resign from the ethics committee even after spending a week in jail.

In that context, double-jobbing by underpaid local authority officials qualifies as petty corruption and cannot be compared to the major sleaze over land rezoning which is the focus of the Flood tribunal. The only thing they have in common is "doing favours" for a fee.

And even though the tribunal has been in session at Dublin Castle for more than three years, some councillors are undoubtedly still taking bribes for fixing up developers and landowners with rezonings; they must believe that what the tribunal is inquiring into is historical.

The Irish Planning Institute and the Republic of Ireland branch of the Royal Town Planning Institute will take comfort from the fact that few, if any, of their members have been fingered by the latest investigations. Most of the moonlighters are engineers, draughtsmen or architects.

The Institution of Engineers of Ireland has set up a three-man panel to investigate breaches of its ethics code by some local authority engineers, including Mr Mangan. Penalties under the code for those found to be in breach could include removal from the IEI's register.

Does it matter? Yes, if the moonlighters can use their influence to steer their private work through the system. But like clientilist politics, tax evasion, rezoning corruption and a general disinclination to enforce rules and regulations of any kind, maybe it's just part of what we are.