In any event, Jones got his rezoning in 1992, and planning permission for more than 1,200 houses on his Ballycullen land has since been granted. The Mahon tribunal will now spend many happy months investigating whether there was any connection between the deposit of so much of Jones' money in the pockets of Dublin councillors and the subsequent decision by those councillors to rezone his land. Jones says not; the councillors are aghast that anybody could suggest such a thing.

As far as I can make out, only two councillors who benefited from Jones' generosity . . . Jack Larkin and John O'Halloran . . . did not vote on the proposal. Nobody voted against, an understandable enough state of affairs, I suppose, given the general willingness of Jones and others to contribute freely to councillors who supported rezonings. For the councillors to have rejected the Ballycullen rezoning would have been to act against their own interests, a bit like Turks voting for bird flu.

It wasn't only Fianna Fail which was involved, of course. Fine Gael names featured prominently in the list of enriched councillors presented at the tribunal last week, as did the name of Pat Rabbitte, then a Democratic Left TD, now leader of the Labour Party. Rabbitte received a £2,000 or £3,000 cash donation during a home visit by Dunlop (their memories differ on the amount), a week after he supported the Ballycullen development in November 1992. The money was returned some weeks later.

Patricia Dillon says there is no allegation of corruption in relation to the payment to Pat Rabbitte, but the tribunal will surely be interested in determining the spirit in which the donation to Democratic Left was made. It might also enquire as to what happened to the money subsequently.

Rabbitte received it in cash (in an envelope, naturally), but it was sent back as a cheque. Was the cheque ever cashed, by Dunlop or Jones, or is there the equivalent of £2,000 to £3,000 in the Labour Party's account all these years later, unspent and unwanted? Was it even lodged to an account?

These are all mere details in the great scheme of things, of course. And the great scheme of things in Irish politics for years, as has been evident from the tribunals, was that Fianna Fail, in particular, corrupted the whole body politic. The corruption ran from the very bottom to the very top and took in the country's former leader, who could rely on the current leader to sign, no questions asked, cheques that were later used for the former leader's gratification and sartorial requirements.

That such a willing lackey of a corrupt Taoiseach is now Taoiseach himself tells us more about Ireland in the last 20 years than any tribunal ever will. While McCracken, Moriarty and Flood/Mahon have done a fantastic job in putting names, dates and places on corruption in Irish life, effectively fleshing out the bones of what was already known or suspected, they will never be able to tell us how this kind of behaviour was allowed to continue and how its perpetrators survived and thrived.

In a normal society, revelations of the kind that came to light in the tribunals would be the launchpad for a massive inquest into the national psyche. How did these things happen? How did these people get away with so much for so long?

How did we not see it? How did we not stop it?

In Ireland, the answers to those questions make for uncomfortable reading. We knew these things were happening, and we let them happen, because this is how we expected politics to be and this is how we wanted politics to be. When the nature of Haughey's corruption became clear, people were taken aback by the precise details of it, but not at all by the fact that it existed. People sensed for years that he was dodgy, just as they suspected that many of his TDs . . . Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, etc . . . and many of his councillors were. But over the years, people have voted for them in enough numbers to have given them a near permanent lock on power.

Fianna Fail was corrupt because we wanted it to be corrupt. Our tolerance for its corruption and for corruption's alternately dandyish and boorish manifestations (Liam Lawlor and Ray Burke; Frank Dunlop and Charles Haughey) was rooted in hundreds of years of colonisation, in which authority was there to be rebelled against and rules were there to be broken.

Fianna Fail presented itself as the party of the cut corner, whose members would get you what you wanted, whether planning permission or social welfare payment, by fair means or foul. There was, about FF . . .

to use that wonderful phrase of Ann Widdecombe, the British MP . . . "something of the night", which accurately reflected a darkness in the Irish personality.

Not much has changed, as the behaviour of many people on the roads suggests. We cut corners and exceed limits and expect to get away with it, just as our political leaders in Fianna Fail have, in their own way, always done. On Friday of next week, as our political correspondent Shane Coleman reports elsewhere today, Bertie Ahern becomes our third longest serving Taoiseach.

For all that we found out about Fianna Fail last week, you wouldn't bet against him still being in the job after the next election. It's just the way of the world.