Mary Harney said on Wednesday that Hugh O'Flaherty had paid a heavy price for his part in the Sheedy affair: "Anyone who met the O'Flahertys in the past year would know that." It didn't occur to her that this is precisely what has been wrong with the O'Flaherty affair from the start.
This is about the difference between those who are likely to run into judges on their social round and those who are not. It's about the difference between those whom Ministers regard as "one of our own" - part of what Sean Duignan calls the famiglia - and the rest of us.
For, although the words quoted above are Harney's, the stroke is Fianna Fail's; as arrogant and as crude as ever. The Progressive Democrats took the blame; but Harney was not so much the author as the patsy of the plot.
It was hatched by Charlie McCreevy, who brazened it out in the Dail, and by Bertie Ahern, who slithered off as if he couldn't spell cute hoor, let alone concoct an excuse to help one of the boys. The O'Flaherty affair was, as Liz McManus described it, a deliberate insult to the citizens of this State: they were, quite simply, taken for granted, treated with contempt.
It happened, said her Labour colleague, Derek McDowell, because Fianna Fail was determined to help O'Flaherty and couldn't care less what anyone else might think. But it was only the first of three insults delivered in a week during which some had cherished vague hope of restoring confidence in politics.
The first was Denis Foley's 14-day suspension, now confirmed by the Dail. The third was another instalment in the story of Haughey's blatant corruption of public office and the leadership of Fianna Fail. Haughey, it now appears, was given more than £8.5 million by cronies between 1979 - when he became leader of the party and Taoiseach - and 1996, four years after his resignation.
Haughey apparently disputes the amount, but it is clear that for 17 years, during which he held the most powerful office in the State, he was in hock to people whose loyalty was to their own commercial interests. Ahern says he and his colleagues were shocked at the news: "What has emerged from all of this is a deviation from the standards and ethos of Fianna Fail not just during the period of the founders, but at all times in our history . . ."
This would have sounded hollow in any week of the year. In the week of the O'Flaherty and Foley affairs, so soon after Frank Dunlop's disclosures to the Flood tribunal, with a new set of questions facing Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn, it's more difficult than usual to associate ethics and integrity with Fianna Fail.
As for Ahern: he climbed trees in north Dublin and sent Dermot Ahern on a fool's errand to London to justify Burke's appointment. He couldn't remember meeting Tom Gilmartin and couldn't bring himself to ask Flynn about Gilmartin's £50,000. He saw nothing wrong with signing books of blank cheques for Haughey in mid-gallop - the sooner he stops pretending to be shocked, and starts answering questions, the better.
Of course, Haughey's apologists say that his donors didn't ask for anything. Haughey didn't dole out favours. So no strings were attached; no harm was done.
This is nonsense. Re-read Mr Justice Brian McCracken's report on payments to politicians, a model of straight thinking and plain language. McCracken makes no bones of it: politicians who depend on payments from businessmen leave themselves open to bribery and corruption. Full stop.
Then there's the example of Celtic Helicopters, a company half-owned by Haughey's son, Ciaran. A list of the businessmen who invested in it was unscrambled by my colleague Mark Brennock when its affairs were examined by the Moriarty tribunal in March.
The investors had done well. Not out of Celtic Helicopters, but as the Haughey-led government's nominees to State boards and as beneficiaries of public funds in a dozen other, often complex, ways.
As I write, the tale of yet another firm set up as a family benefit (Conor Haughey's Feltrim) is coming to light at Dublin Castle. Feltrim never showed a profit, but its chairman, Bernie Cahill, was also chairman of Aer Lingus. And among its rescuers was the ubiquitous tax exile, Dermot Desmond.
Friends and investors. Friends in the Law Library. Coincidence after coincidence, as the evidence of closed shops and class interests accumulates. Two statements summed up the way in which the events of the week were viewed, from different angles and with different attitudes to the wheels within wheels of Irish society.
Tom Kirby, the father of Anne Ryan, who died in the accident for which Philip Sheedy was sentenced, spoke to Marian Finucane on RTE Radio 1 about the O'Flaherty affair.
He forgave Sheedy, who had "done his purgatory", but not those who'd nominated O'Flaherty to the European job. He asked why O'Flaherty hadn't even explained his role in the affair. "They get away with everything", he said.
After which Harney's "I did not envisage the sense of public outrage" is a faint echo of the surly indifference shown by McCreevy and Ahern. Now, if only they'd known the 16-year-old for whom Mr Justice Peter Kelly is concerned, she wouldn't have to spend the next six months locked up, day and night, in a ward with 29 mentally ill adults.
The girl is disturbed, not guilty of an offence; but the State has no place for her. Mary Hanafin was asked if she accepted responsibility on behalf of the Government for the failures criticised by the judge.
Did she hell. She blamed, of all things, "the people of Ireland". We have no place for a disturbed 16 year-old. But John O'Donoghue has just announced we're to have another 700 places for prisoners.
Life is cheap out there in the poorer areas where, as John Lonergan could tell you, 700 children are even now being bent to fit those cells - as surely as 700 others are being groomed for power and privilege.
Life is cheap, as Pat Rabbitte reflected in one of his Magill columns. There have been 24 murders since the beginning of the year. The poor killing the poor: their deaths make a paragraph in the newspapers, a line down the news.
Fifteen people were killed in accidents at work during the first quarter of the year, many of them in industries, like construction, with poor safety records and profitable connections with Fianna Fail.
Seven young people have died in a fortnight, possibly as a result of using contaminated heroin. They were not middle-class people.
The Government does not envisage any sense of public outrage.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie