Dear John Bruton: Like many people, you must marvel at the polls from time to time. You must wonder how it can be that a deeply disillusioned public seems willing to believe an entirely unsubstantiated allegation of corruption against Bertie Ahern and yet keep his popularity ratings in the political stratosphere.
You would not be human if you didn't curse whatever quirk in the public mind gave you precious little credit for a booming economy when you were Taoiseach and yet acclaims Ber tie for the same thing. You must be tempted to blame the extraordinary failure of an endless series of scandals to have any real effect on the Government's chances of re-election on such nebulous notions as the Bertie Factor and the Teflon Taoiseach.
But sometimes it must strike you that all of these mysteries have a short, simple explanation: you. The bitter truth is that you have become the biggest single barrier to the kind of fundamental change for which an angry public is yearning. As they turn away in disgust from an ugly and cynical regime, they look around for the alternative. When their eyes light on you, they turn back again. You evidently feel that all of this will change when the general election comes, that when people really start to think of you as a possible Taoiseach, your stature will rise again.
You must know this is an illusion, for you have already had your fairy-tale ending. The fates which impelled Albert Reynolds to commit political suicide at his own moment of destiny transformed you from frog to prince, from a hap less and hopeless leader of the Opposition to a capable, confident, often impressive Taoiseach.
You ran a potentially fractious coalition very well. You were very unlucky to become a major player in the Northern Ireland peace process at a time when it was going through the inevitable hangover after the somewhat unreal optimism of the first IRA ceasefire. History will recognise the long-term importance of your willingness to stand up to the republican movement in the aftermath of the Canary Wharf bombing. Your firmness of purpose then played a crucial role in making the Belfast Agreement possible.
But even at the height of your stature and credibility, you always had one key weakness. You never really got the point of the long struggle against the old political culture and the desire for democratic renewal which has shaped politics in the Republic over the last decade. You rode the wave of change without really knowing in which direction the tide was running.
Even as Charles Haughey was being unmasked at the McCracken tribunal, you failed to explain the contradictions in your own accounts of your fund-raising for Fine Gael.
Having come to power because your predecessors had tied themselves in knots with incomplete answers in the Dail, you astonishingly repeated the old Ray Burke line about people not getting the right answers because they didn't ask the right questions. In a climate of revulsion against a system which had set up a grotesquely anti-democratic distinction between the people and the State, you allowed your administration to treat a terribly wronged citizen, Brigid McCole, as an enemy of the State.
AND you still don't get it. You persist in regarding the whole issue of the subversion of democracy by men with money as being only about "them". The principles which you articulate so well in your criticisms of Fianna Fail's culture of sleaze seem, in your mind, to have no bearing on how you conduct your own party.
So when it emerges, for example, that the former Fine Gael leader on Dublin County Council Tom Morrissey told you when you were Taoiseach that he had been offered a huge bribe, and that you did nothing, the only response from your party is to abuse Tom Morrissey. When people closely associated with Fine Gael emerge badly from inquiries into the DIRT and Ansbacher scandals, you seem to have little to say.
The last straw is your astounding decision to reach out to Michael Lowry in your interview with Mark Brennock in last week's Irish Times. Now, you know damn well that Michael Lowry was up to his neck in Offshore Ireland. You know that in order to evade tax he entered into arrangements with Dunnes Stores which, in the words of Mr Justice McCracken, made him, in an important economic ministry, "vulnerable to all kinds of pressures from Dunnes Stores had they chosen to apply those pressures".
You know that even when this first emerged in public, he misled that Dail by telling it that if he had been trying to hide income, he would have put it in an offshore account, when in fact he had not one but two offshore accounts in which he was hiding income. You know that he made a huge contribution to what the McCracken report again describes as the "public perception that a person in the position of a Government minister . . . was able to ignore, and indeed cynically evade both the taxation and ex change control laws of the State with impunity".
Yet, just at the moment when that culture of impunity is sticking in the craw of most citizens, you come out with the very same line that Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney spun in defence of the decision to reward Hugh O'Flaherty: the second chance. With that second chance you blew your last chance. You simply cannot now present yourself as the leader of a genuine political alternative to the system of sleaze and impunity which will dominate the next election.
So, if you're sincere about wanting to change the system, by far the biggest contribution you can make now is to resign. You can earn back the respect you lost last week by one final act of genuine patriotism. As Lady Macbeth says to the courtiers who have just seen their leader lose the run of himself:
Stand not upon the order of your going,
But go at once.
fotoole@irish-times.ie