They'll bury Jack Lynch in Cork today and honour the last Fianna Fail leader over whose career no doubts are raised.
The irony can scarcely have been lost on those who spoke well of him this week, when tributes to Lynch's public service competed for attention with reports from the tribunals over which Judges Moriarty and Flood preside.
For among the many who praised him were several who had contributed, for better or worse, to the events that have changed Fianna Fail and the country since his arrival as leader and Taoiseach 33 years ago.
The party was already changing then, and Lynch continued the slow march towards modernisation which had begun with Sean Lemass - and the coalition governments he opposed.
When Lynch retired in 1979, the nature as well as the style of leadership changed; and, because of the importance of leadership in Fianna Fail, so did the party.
His replacement was the first jolt in what was to become a headlong decline.
The party Lynch joined was populist in the classic sense: more movement than party, convinced that it embodied the spirit of the nation, from which its own ideals were both inseparable and indistinguishable.
The ideals were not expressed in political programmes, but in broad aspirations favouring unity, the Irish language and life on the land; to which the programmes for economic expansion had lately been added.
If the party didn't need written programmes, it was because policy on every important issue was articulated by the leader; the party seldom doubted his word and always followed his line.
This made leadership more important and the leader more powerful than in an orthodox party: Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass were remote, unquestioned, all but untouchable.
And if Jack Lynch could be called a reluctant leader, it was because that was the kind of daemonic leadership - Dev had been elevated to the status of a demi-god - which he did not want.
High-flown rhetoric was not his style. He never cared for notions of a golden age, especially one that existed only in the imaginations of Charles Kickham and Dev.
HE followed Lemass's lead on the need for reconciliation, North and South: he thought political division bred in the Civil War or in sectarian hostility as damaging to democracy as the violence which he loathed in any shape or form.
By the time he quit its leadership, Fianna Fail was beginning to be a different, more orthodox, more modern, party, capable of shedding core values when the need arose.
There has been much well-earned praise of his achievements and some fond remembering during the past few days, but a couple of unremarked changes suggest a prescience with which he should be credited.
One was to remove from the Constitution the special position of the Catholic Church, the other was to put a stop to the activities of the party's fund-raising organisation, Taca.
This didn't make him a radical: it showed that he recognised the need to separate church and state; and that he clearly saw the risks attached to an unhealthy closeness between business and politics.
(His highly successful election campaign in 1969 seemed to include visits to every second convent in the country; and the world tour which took him to Japan was both an effort to secure industry for Cork and Ireland and an advertisement for Gulf Oil.)
By the time he left its leadership, the party stood closer to the rest of Europe, had set relations with the United Kingdom on an even keel (almost) and was less threatening to unionism than some of his colleagues would have it appear.
Lynch did this without moving away from the people he came from or acting as if he needed a change of image or class. He never wanted, never pretended, to to be anyone but himself.
A youngish commentator Jackie Gallagher, of Finlay and Gallagher, marvelled the other night at what he called the innocence of the 1970s. He wondered if tributes, similar to those now awarded to Jack Lynch, would follow his successors.
Barring miracles or sudden, last-minute conversion, it's most unlikely.
In the age of innocence, you see, leaders lived within their means - and ours. They may have forgotten the odd event; they didn't airbrush all records of meetings, decisions, donations and alliances from their memories.
Their officials didn't rush off to destroy their diaries to protect their boss's secrets from the inquiring eyes of some independent judge; they didn't have to. No one would dream of claiming that their activities were other than above board.
And the bosses, for their part, were never forced to rely on pathetic variations of Bart Simpson's defence: I didn't do it, there's no evidence, you can't prove anything.
Jack Lynch was an honourable man, whose name was airbrushed from the party's records after his resignation. Many of his supporters were driven out - Des O'Malley on the grounds of conduct unbecoming - or left.
The nature of the leadership reverted to the old untouchable, unquestioned and unquestioning style; the nature of the party changed with it. Public cynicism grew, not just about Fianna Fail or its leadership, but (because it suited some to claim there were no distinctions) about politics and politicians at large.
Another enemy of cynicism is being commemorated in Limerick today. Jim Kemmy, socialist, writer, editor and politician, was long committed to the city and the public service of its citizens.
Indeed, he took public service so seriously that he devoted his mayor's allowance to projects which, he felt, needed the money more than he did.
Now, the artists of the city are returning the compliment with an exhibition at Limerick's City Gallery of Art, which remains open until November 4th. A colloquium is being held in the gallery this afternoon.
This country needs the sense of public service demonstrated by a Jack Lynch or a Jim Kem my, each in his own way; it also needs a calm and resolute approach by those providing public services - often in the teeth of populist opposition and criticism.
The Nursing Alliance has been subjected to a barrage of heavy-handed, in some cases hysterical, criticism for several days.
Indeed, I didn't realise that some of my journalistic colleagues cared so much about the state of the health services - and especially those provided by the public hospitals - until I heard them on the radio.
I can only hope that their interest lasts when the dispute is settled, as it will be, by discussions which should have taken place at least a week ago, if not from the moment of the nurses' overwhelming decision.
In pursuit of the struggle against cynicism, I'd like to encourage people living in Dublin South Central to take a half-an-hour off on Wednesday to vote in the by-election.
It's your choice: if you don't exercise it, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.