The death and State funeral of Charles J Haughey has brought a tide of tributes, personal memories, mixed assessments and inevitable criticisms of the man who dominated Irish politics in the second half of the 20th century. Whether in power or not, he played a pivotal role in Irish public life over four decades, as large an influence on his political opponents as he was on his supporters.
Stopping Haughey was as strong a motivation in building opposing coalitions as voting for his flawed vision of Fianna Fáil and of Ireland. Much of politics - and even more of political discussion - hinged on how Mr Haughey would react to other parties' policies, to his own dissidents and to those thousands of loyalists who rose to follow him slavishly.
He encountered a great deal of political adversity. The Arms Trial in 1970 - in which he bore the brunt of Fianna Fáil's unresolved contradictions on the North - alone would have ended the career of most other politicians; successive revolts within his own party would have removed any other leader; repeated failure to win the extra couple of percentage points in general elections to give Fianna Fáil an overall majority would equally have toppled most other leaders.
Obviously, no politician achieves such a dominant position without driving ambition but that alone was not enough. He was smart, shrewd, charismatic, generous, innovative, witty and a visionary - all the things his supporters believed him to be. He looked after his constituents and his cronies, introduced far-seeing and life-changing measures like free travel for pensioners and tax relief for artists, and has left behind physical and practical monuments, like Government Buildings and the IFSC.
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But there is also a large "but" hanging over his legacy. It was exemplified by the revelations of his tax evasions, his threats to bankers who sought their money back, his personal use of public funds, and effective extortion of large sums from rich benefactors to fund a lavish lifestyle. He was a bully, he could be vindictive, and his fabled wit and repartee was frequently abusive, threatening and dismissive. He encouraged, by default if not always by design, an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, an atmosphere in which grown men with families feared for their futures and any successful business person would think twice about turning down a request from a Haughey henchman for a contribution. On occasion, as this Editor can attest, that atmosphere spilled over into overt threats of violence requiring Garda protection to be a political correspondent covering the Dáil.
Mr Haughey did not create corruption in Ireland - nor did it go away when he left office. But he gave it a veneer of political sanction. He used the democratic process to achieve power as leader of Fianna Fáil and as taoiseach and then to help to undermine the rule of law and to encourage the belief that it is who you know that matters, not what the rules dictate; that what you can get away with is more important than what you do. He institutionalised corruption. Others merely sought their share of the cake.
On the main political issues of his decades at the top of politics, he was less than visionary. On the North and social issues, he was arguably the last major political figure to try to hold the line against Ireland entering the 20th century, never mind the 21st. His dismissal from the cabinet on suspicion of involvement in a conspiracy to import illegal arms during the 1970 Arms Crisis set the tone for his future policy on Northern Ireland. With a shadow hanging over him, he played the green card to help himself into government. He told his first ardfheis, as taoiseach, in 1980 - that Northern Ireland as a political entity had failed and there could be no internal solution. This was a startling, albeit true, admission at the time. He did put Anglo-Irish relations on to a new plane. But, true to character, he over-sold his potentially significant initiative with the British prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, in the early 1980s and dishonestly opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
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On social issues, he also took a traditional view, opposing the introduction of divorce and giving in to pressure to make the ban on abortion a constitutional issue. His famous decision to make contraceptives available on medical prescription to married couples only - an Irish solution to an Irish problem - was risible. These were all political manoeuvres, designed to wrong-foot his political opponents. They had nothing to do with his own lifestyle.
On the economy, he also tried to implement a uniquely Irish solution to the problem, the one that worked for him in his personal life: borrow all the money that you can and don't bother paying it back. Unfortunately, for Ireland and its citizens who paid taxes, the country's creditors were not as easily intimidated as the local Dame Street branch of the AIB. The result was a lost decade in the 1980s for many Irish people, some of whom are still struggling with the problems of living illegally in the US.
His supporters can claim he contributed to the foundations for the Celtic Tiger and for the peace process in the late 1980s. He could have used his considerable talents to try to initiate those developments a decade earlier. But he chose not to do so, partly because he did not want to make decisions that might make him unpopular, partly because he was a conservative at heart and a traditionalist in spite of appearances to the contrary.
Mr Haughey was a complex and troubled man. When his personal interest was not at stake, he did serve the State. On his death, what might have surprised him was the limited public interest in his funeral.