The piper at Abbeville. The searing lament on the tin whistle, played by Paddy Moloney.

The motorcycle outriders, who escorted two of the most despised groups in the country . . .

politicians and journalists . . . to the removal on Thursday.

He had justifiable confidence in his brother, Eoghan, who played such a central role in the obsequies. Fr Eoghan Haughey looks a little like Gay Byrne . . . the same upturned nose, the same inquisitive tilt of the head, the same height. When he addressed the congregation as "Brothers and sisters" and referred to "Our brother Cathal", it was strange to think that Charles Haughey really was his brother. After the Taoiseach had given the graveside oration, Fr Eoghan Haughey walked forward to embrace him, so you knew that Bertie had done all right.

He would have known that the president would be there, looking pretty in a nice black hat. That the colour party would fold the tricolour with great care. That his sweet grandchildren would throw flowers on his grave. That his daughter, Eimear, would kiss a red rose before throwing it down.

Charles Haughey was a talented man, and one of his greatest talents was for public relations. For someone who was assumed to despise the media he certainly knew how to handle it. When he came up with the "I have done the state some service; they know it" quote in his 1992 resignation speech he produced a convenient slogan for all who spoke about him subsequently. It certainly covers a multitude. Bertie used it in his speech.

At the removal on Thursday, Dermot Desmond came in a car so large that it was said that onlookers thought that it was the arrival of the Taoiseach.

At the graveyard on Friday, the funeral ceremony from Donnycarney church was fed onto a large screen, which had been set up in the lawn section of St Fintan's cemetery, where all the gravestones lie flat.

Cemeteries hold innumerable stories . . .

there is a priest there who was buried in the same grave as his housekeeper . . . but surely St Fintan's has seen no stranger sight than this huge television screen, sitting fresh amongst the graves. It was a Stepford touch.

In front of the screen, as the funeral was ending, knelt a woman in a beige knitted twopiece, with a man beside her, also kneeling.

Not only were the pair kneeling as the screen showed Haughey's coffin being carried up the aisle, but the woman was kneeling in front of the screen as the crowd came to pay its respects to the Haughey family outside the church afterwards. She was still kneeling when Ivor Callely kissed Mrs Maureen Haughey.

Also looking at the screen, but a bit further back, were Michael Finlay, Dick O'Keeffe, and Willie Walshe. They are, respectively, secretary, chairman and treasurer of the Kells-Stonyford Fianna Fail cumann in Kilkenny. "We came to the graveyard to see the end, " said Finlay. "He was such a great man." When asked about Haughey's achievements, Finlay listed the free travel for pensioners. "And I agreed with him on the North [at the time of the Arms Trial]. Maybe he should have gone further and got his way.

Different times."

Finlay, who had come up on 8.15 train that morning, thought the funeral was going well.

"Depends who you talk to. I reckon everything's going off nice. Let the man rest.

Time will judge."

Finlay is a dairy farmer, and there is a lull in the work just now. "The silage is made, " he said. There are 43 cumainn in Co Kilkenny, he said, and every one of them is represented in Dublin today. Later they might meet up for a drink. "It's a moment, " said Finlay.

The cortege arrived, headed by the Defence Forces band playing 'Down By The Sally Gardens'. The rain had started shortly before three o'clock and the coffin arrived at a quarter to four. The crowd at the graveyard was not as big as you might have expected, but then this is a burial in the Dublin suburbs on a Friday. Elsewhere the World Cup and traffic jams raged.

Jimmy Guerin had been standing guard near the grave since about two. Pat Doherty of Sinn Fein. John Hume. Fr Alex Reid, who presided at the prayers but did not speak.

During the prayers, the crowd surged forward through the barriers towards the family and friends of the deceased, but it was not a large crowd and it was very respectful.

Someone spotted the builder Michael Bailey [who has appeared at the Flood tribunal] leaning on a gravestone.

During the recitation of the Rosary, the noise of camera shutters popped like corn on a griddle. The photographers were giving out about umbrellas obstructing their view, the palm trees that ruined shots of the coffin entering the graveyard.

We reporters had no script for the Taoiseach's oration. We were told there was no script, although Bertie seemed to have one on the lectern in front of him. We scribbled down what he said as our notebooks ran with rain.

"He was a legend. . . never forgot his roots or the quintessential Dublin values. . . practising accountant. . . This political career was controversial to say the least. . . a man who did not ride the winds or tides, he sought to change them. . . patriot to his fingertips. . .

Yeats. . . a radical reformer."

Ahern listed Temple Bar and the Single European Act and the Programme for National Recovery among Haughey's achievements. Ahern said that "no country had provided the world with more literary and artistic genius" . . . which is bad news for the Italians.

Ahern only faltered when he spoke of "Charlie. Boss." Indeed, as he reminded us, he had canvassed for Haughey as a teenager.

Haughey had recalled ruefully to him that he had had nine lives. And that ninth life, said Ahern, was finally extinguished now. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt . . . "it is not the critic who counts. . . the credit belongs to the man who is in the arena".

They played the 'Last Post' and then the 'Reveille'. We moved away. Out on the road 12 garda motorbikes were standing, waiting for their riders, who were chatting to each other with their helmets on.

"I think I'll just tootle off on my own, " said one of them. The big cars started to climb the hill towards Howth.

It was an anti-climax, as much-vaunted occasions often are. Haughey was 80. He died a wealthy man, surrounded by a family that loved him. The buzz of a modern Dublin Friday hummed on. A colleague on this newspaper was nine years old when Mr Haughey resigned. There are thousands of foreign workers here, stitched into the Irish economy, who have never heard of Charles Haughey.

On Thursday, Fr Eoghan Haughey said that those who loved Charles Haughey should look on his death as "like someone going ahead, and booking us into a hotel". The rest of us were left with the certainty that it would be a very good hotel; and wondering how much it was going to cost us.

CHARLES HAUGHEY IN QUOTES

"An Irish solution to an Irish problem" On making contraception available to married couples on prescription in new Family Planning legislation in 1979.

"Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented" On the discovery of the country's most wanted criminal suspect in the Attorney General's apartment in 1981 "As a country we are living way beyond our means. We have been living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amount of goods and services we are producing" A warning in 1980 that the nation needed to "tighten its belt" "I've been around so long now they know I don't eat babies" On his return to power in 1987 "Coalition governments go against every fibre of my being" His comment a few weeks before the decision to share government with the PDs in 1989 "What I have to do, I do with great sadness and great sorrow" Before sacking Brian Lenihan as Tanaiste in 1990 "I have done the state some service.

They know't. No more of that" Quoting Othello on the day he stepped down as Taoiseach in 1992 "Nothing about me was ever run of the mill" A comment he made at one of his private sessions at the Moriarty tribunal