On January 27th, 1999, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made a statement in the Dáil that he must have known to be untrue. At the time, Tom Gilmartin's allegations about corruption in the planning process had recently surfaced in the media. Among those allegations was one that the former minister for the environment Pádraig Flynn had received IR£50,000 from Gilmartin in 1989, writes Fintan O'Toole
Discussing his reaction to this allegation, Bertie Ahern told the Dáil: "I was shocked that this amount of money could be floating around because it never floated anywhere that I had been over the years."
We now know that this claim was blatantly false. He could not have been shocked that sums of the order of IR£50,000 were floating around Fianna Fáil because he had been given sums of the same order himself. And he knew that it was untrue to say that money on this scale "never floated anywhere that I had been over the years". He knew, in effect, that any outrage that he felt obliged to express in the face of such allegations was bogus.
But he also knew back then that for a politician to take this kind of money was wrong. And in that knowledge, Bertie, the ordinary Joe Soap, the uncomplicated man, becomes an almost tragic figure. Like a protagonist from an Ibsen play, he lives two lives - one of present-day success and another of secret knowledge of the past. He knows that the sins of a former life are still out there, waiting to catch up with him.
He feels, too, that the past is watching him. The gaunt features and piercing eyes of Eamon de Valera are before him, delivering a silent rebuke. In that debate, Bertie Ahern praised the "standards of austere integrity" laid down by de Valera and committed himself to "the idealism and integrity that characterised the early members of Dáil Éireann".
He knew very well what these standards would mean in practical terms: "if people take contributions of £30,000, £40,000 or £50,000 it is very hard to explain, and for that reason I do not think people should do that. Contributions of that order cannot ever be explained to the ordinary man or woman in the street. For that reason I do not think they are appropriate."
And always, at the back of his mind, there must have been the nagging awareness that these words were those of a hypocrite.
Irish politics often works retrospectively. Politics is, indeed, the last bastion of an old Irish culture in which, as James Joyce put it, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
In his Dáil statement that day, the Taoiseach spoke of "dark deeds from the past" which he had no desire to hide. But, of course, he was hiding them.
Even as he uttered those words, they must have conjured up for him a personal meaning that was not open to any of his hearers.
And it is only now that we can get a glimpse of that private past that we can understand so much of what Bertie Ahern has done and failed to do. One of the things that always seemed extraordinary, for example, was the way Bertie Ahern refused to do anything about allegations that money intended by donors for Fianna Fáil had found its way into personal bank accounts.
He did not seem concerned that when the developer Mark Kavanagh gave IR£100,000 to the then leader Charles Haughey as a political donation to Fianna Fáil, only IR£25,000 got to the party.
And when Tom Gilmartin alleged that he had given IR£50,000 for the party to Pádraig Flynn, and Bertie Ahern learned that this money had not in fact been passed on, he did nothing to get the money back.
When the then party organiser Seán Sherwin revealed that he had a recollection of the matter, Bertie Ahern, in his own words, "immediately stated that anything Mr Sherwin had to say should not be said to me but to the Fianna Fáil legal team".
It seemed bizarre at the time that the leader of the party would specifically instruct his officials not to tell him about a large contribution that had allegedly failed to reach party coffers.
But in the light of last week's evidence at the Mahon tribunal from Padraic O'Connor, it makes perfect sense. Knowing what he knew about himself, how could Bertie Ahern bear to hear allegations about his colleagues?
It can't have been easy, coming out with all that stuff about austere integrity and dark deeds from the past, knowing all the time that you're hiding intimate truths.
And while the revelations that are now catching up with him diminish his stature as a man and a leader, they substantially raise Bertie Ahern's standing as performer. He kept up the front for a very long time, and he did it with calm, conviction and an aura of simple sincerity.
We always knew that he was very good at projecting himself as a character in a soap opera. We never guessed that he was also performing in a high-class psychodrama of guilt, silence and eventual revelation.