At times in the last two weeks the symbolism of Irish politics has been so heavy-handed that no satiric novelist could hope to get away with it. Only an amateur would go for the ironic contrast implied by Frank Dunlop's testimony to the Flood tribunal of handing over wads of cash to Dublin county councillors in Conway's pub on Parnell Square, site of Patrick Pearse's surrender to the British in 1916.
But not even a ham-fisted, would-be satirist would invent the imagery of last Monday. The sacred Republican ground of Arbour Hill, on Easter Monday, at a Fianna Fail commemoration of the Rising, could not possibly be the setting for the unprecedented drama of a sitting Taoiseach having bluntly to deny allegations of corruption.
And it's just too far-fetched to imagine that same Taoiseach later that afternoon in the winners' enclosure at the Irish Grand National, chatting happily to Dermot Desmond, the hugely wealthy tax exile whose involvement in the Telecom scandal a decade ago raised concerns about a golden circle to new heights and who has been defiantly unrepentant about making large donations to Charles Haughey. Yet it really happened. And it brought home more vividly than all the detailed evidence being unearthed by the Flood and Moriarty tribunals the strange state of contemporary Irish politics. The unthinkable has become unremarkable. The grotesque is no longer unbelievable. The bizarre is no longer unprecedented.
At one level, the Taoiseach's forthright statement at Arbour Hill was reassuring. His clear denial of a previously veiled allegation that he had received £50,000 in a hotel car park from Owen O'Callaghan in 1989 must, in the absence of any public evidence to the contrary, be accepted without reservation. And that will be a comfort to Irish people far beyond the core constituency of party loyalists. Fundamental issues of national pride and self-respect are bound up with the office of Taoiseach. To adapt Oscar Wilde, electing one corrupt Taoiseach in a decade might seem unfortunate, but electing two would begin to look careless.
Even when Charles Haughey was in power, no journalist ever managed to put a direct accusation of corruption to him or to evoke a denial as explicit as Bertie Ahern's on Monday.
On the basis of his denials, Bertie Ahern is entitled to feel aggrieved at this state of affairs. But he is partly responsible for it. By denying so often that any sheep were missing or that the wolf of corruption was anywhere in the vicinity, he created a tendency to assume the wolves must be everywhere.
The basic problem is that Monday's clear, frank and definitive statement by the Taoiseach was in stark contrast to many of his previous statements about specific allegations of corruption within Fianna Fail. In dealing with allegations about the behaviour of Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn, he has been far less forthright.
We now know, for example, that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Charles Haughey was Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern was the co-signatory of cheques drawn on the party leader's allowance provided by the Exchequer. Some of these cheques were made out to the likes of the Coq Hardi restaurant in Dublin and the Charvet shirt shop in Paris. Forty per cent of all the cheques were made out in suspiciously round figures.
According to the evidence to the Moriarty tribunal of Haughey's former private secretary Eileen Foy, "Bertie Ahern pre-signed all the cheques". This practice, as the Fianna Fail TD and former party financial official Sean Fleming told the tribunal "defeats the whole purpose of having two signatories to an account".
At the very least, the practice of signing blank cheques for the use of public funds by a leader long suspected of corruption showed a remarkable naivety on Ahern's part. And that naivety seemed to continue even when Haughey's venality was exposed by the McCracken tribunal. When the Moriarty tribunal was being established in September 1997, Ahern ensured that his party voted down an opposition attempt to include the leader's account in its terms of reference. Speaking of Mr Ahern, Charlie McCreevy told the Dail: "When this matter was raised some months ago, the Taoiseach consulted the party administrator who was in office when Mr Haughey was party leader. The Taoiseach was satisfied that there was nothing untoward in the way the money was spent."
Nor was Ahern's response to allegations about Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn any more impressive. We now know just how perfunctory and ineffective was his investigation of allegations about Ray Burke before he appointed him to the cabinet in 1997. We know, too, how poorly the results of that investigation stand up to what has been revealed about the huge donations Ray Burke received from JMSE, Rennick's and Oliver Barry.
We don't yet know the full truth about allegations that Padraig Flynn received £50,000 from the developer Tom Gilmartin in 1989. But we know enough to detect a certain lack of zeal in Bertie Ahern's handling of the allegation. In 1998 the national organiser of Fianna Fail, Sean Sherwin, told general secretary Martin Mackin of his recollection of being told of the donation to Padraig Flynn by Tom Gilmartin. Bertie Ahern, in turn, was told of these recollections and was, according to a statement he made in the Dail in January 1999, "shocked that this amount of money could be floating around because it never floated anywhere that I had been over the years".
This shock, however, was not sufficient to encourage him to tell either the general public or his coalition partner Mary Harney about Sean Sherwin's recollections. So far as we have been told, he did nothing at all.
What is clear is that, at the very latest by September 1998, Bertie Ahern had strong evidence that Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn had, while in office, received large payments from businessmen. As a protege and colleague of these men, he had an overwhelming personal interest in distancing himself from their actions and drawing a clear line between those politicians who behaved ethically and those who did not. Yet he didn't take that opportunity.
It was the evasion of these issues that left that era in Irish politics open to dark suspicions, insidious rumours and unjust implications. The cruel irony is that last weekend Bertie Ahern himself became the undeserved object of these suspicions. Now that he has learned the cost of leaving that period so murky, he will undoubtedly bring his new-found clarity to bear on all future allegations.