It is a sad week when we find ourselves back to the same old rigmarole again. Secretive money payments and tribunals of inquiry, economy with the truth, minimalist disclosure and concealment of facts are all flavour of the month once again.
Bertie's nice man image has been severely dented and comparisons are now being made with his two predecessors in the leadership of Fianna Fail.
Now we know why Ray Burke decided last October not just to resign from the Government but to resign from the Dail also.
If he were still around while all this was going on, inevitably he would be asked a lot more questions and expected to answer them a lot more rapidly than when he finally appears before the Flood Tribunal.
The Government's majority on Wednesday night was only four. When one recalls that Hugh Coveney is dead and at least two Fine Gael TDs are out ill, it shows how narrow things are.
Neither the Flood nor the Moriarty Tribunal has held any public sessions so far, other than purely formal ones.
However, we are assured that all kinds of good work are going on in the background privately, and that whenever they do start up public sessions the process will be rapid, due to all the preparatory work done.
This Government is likely to have the shadow of various tribunals and other inquiries hanging over it for some time to come.
It will be looking over its shoulder. The scarcely concealed anger of Mary Harney and her colleagues at not being told what was happening will inevitably lead to a much more tense situation at the Cabinet table.
Apart from the questions that Bertie Ahern still needs to answer satisfactorily, there are a few fundamental questions to be put to Ray Burke.
In a short period immediately before the 1989 general election he obtained two donations amounting to £60,000. He handed over £10,000 of this in total to Fianna Fail.
What happened to the other £50,000? Was Ray the only beneficiary or did he share his good fortune with anybody else in north Co Dublin or elsewhere? How does he justify his statement to the Dail last September which gave the House a completely misleading impression?
How many more large donations of this kind did he get during his career and what was done with them? Will he genuinely co-operate with the Flood Tribunal or will he, in spite of his likely protestations to the contrary, effectively try to stymie it?
Will the previous Garda investigations into aspects of his activities now be reopened? How much did his colleagues really know about what he was up to over the years?
There are other disquieting aspects of this affair also.
One of them is the role of Independent Newspapers and its reaction to the disclosures of the past week. It has had no compunction about using its editorial policy to defend its commercial interests.
Given that it is by far the largest Irish newspaper group, is this good enough? Have we politicians and the public paid sufficient attention to concentration of ownership and control of the media?
Independent Newspapers has come out with all guns blazing in support not alone of its own direct commercial interests but that of associated companies which also happen to be under the chairmanship of Dr Tony O'Reilly.
This has disturbed many of its own journalists, who feel that they never signed on for such an agenda and that it damages their credibility.
An increasingly big question must now be: how independent is the Independent? This at least is one aspect of the affair which will be quietly enjoyed in Leinster House because nothing exercises journalists quite like the calling into question of their own credibility and objectivity.
Another undesirable feature of the present Burke revelations and the fall-out from the way they were handled arises from the use and apparent credibility given in the Dail to anonymous letters.
Drapier always took the view that the best place for anonymous letters was the wastepaper basket, because to try to make use of them left the whole political system open to the gravest potential abuse.
In this week's debate we found Bertie Ahern accused of not giving credence to an anonymous letter and John Bruton boasting that he sent one on to one of the tribunals, with a clear implication that it was valid and somehow proper and praiseworthy to do so.
This country is a great source of anonymous letters. If these are now to be acted on and if people are to be blamed for ignoring them, we are in for a real spate of McCarthyism and rank injustice will be rife.
Every two-bit deputy will be able to write himself an anonymous letter and then make up marvellous revelations based on it. The frenzied atmosphere in which we are living is conducive to this kind of thing and Drapier feels we should all stand back from it a bit and take a grip on ourselves.
If we equate an allegation with evidence we will perpetrate appalling injustices, and people will increasingly have to resort to the courts for protection. Dail debates under absolute privilege will become a farce if deputies seek to outdo one another in anonymous and unsustainable allegations.
Why did the occupant of the chair allow Ruairi Quinn to read out and put on the record of the House an anonymous letter which, incidentally, it now appears may not have been shown to the Taoiseach last September by Dick Spring as claimed by Mr Quinn?