Except in two instances - Ben Dunne's meeting with Revenue and passports for Mr Fustok's relatives - no direct delivery of corrupt payoffs for monies donated was proven. Even the language used about the former taoiseach was woolly. "Reprehensible" isn't exactly a stab-in-thegizzard condemnation. In fact, bit players like Ben Dunne got thumped more directly than did the star of the show.

That Euro45m allowed a satisfying leap of logic to be made: If he got that amount of money, he must have done something for it. The rule of reciprocity must apply. That rule holds that, since primeval times, human socialisation has been rooted in the 'You owe me' obligation created by accepting a gift. Ergo, if rich guys gave CJ money, and continued to give him money for more than a decade, he must have reciprocated by skewing our laws to favour them. Never mind the lack of evidence, feel the inevitability.

Except that this is to apply general rules to a unique figure - a unique, self-confected figure. Haughey didn't just march to a different drum, he marched to a different orchestra. He was an unparalleled expert in the exploitation of human inadequacy. He never surrounded himself with the brightest and best. Instead, he surrounded himself with the neediest and most resentful, creating out of them a conspiracy of the potentially excluded. To be invited to the bar in Kinsealy was to join a boozing bitch session, united by contempt for everybody not present.

Long before the current ad campaign about The Power of One, Charles Haughey understood that one man, if he has a strong enough personality, and operates within a series of self-contained cells, and is impervious to criticism, can subvert most of the checks and balances built into a democracy, not least because of the misplaced general faith in those checks and balances.

He had media taped from the start. At every press conference, Vincent Browne could be relied on to get going on the discrepancy between Haughey's lifestyle and his known legitimate earnings. In theory, this should have worked. In reality, a mixture of banter and insult, combined with the Browne-directed impatience of other journalists, turned it into no more than a recurring sideshow.

Most Fianna F�?il politicians survive media criticism by lumping the critics into a box labelled 'Enemy + Secret Blueshirt/Sticky/Sinn Féin'.

(For some reason, nobody is ever assumed to be a covert supporter of the Greens. ) Charles Haughey was the apotheosis of this process. He saw all journalists as contemptible and had an acute and subtle understanding that, for many of them, a critical stance substituted for serious investigation. (His contempt for the press was grimly reinforced in his final years by the arrival in Kinsealy of dozens of begging letters from writers and broadcasters, many of them offering to hand editorial control over to the former taoiseach, if only he'd grant them the big interview they just knew he needed to give to put his side of the story. ) His contempt for journalists matched his contempt for most people, and was fuelled by his knowledge of how easy it was to intimidate all but a tiny minority of his court.

It's easy, today, to be outraged at Bertie Ahern for signing cheques by the bookful without asking questions. That is to ignore the real and present threat Haughey presented to the political survival of those around him.

It's easy, today, to be outraged that this man was able to trouser Euro45m unhindered by media, the Revenue Commissioners, the Garda S�?och�?na or anybody else, when "the dogs in the street" knew he was on the take. It must be remembered, however, that the same dogs knew all about the taoiseach's mistress, not least because she told them about their goings-on every week in the Sunday Independent. And yet Haughey's own son Se�?n didn't know for sure that her boasts were anything but fiction until the day a consultant preparing him for a media appearance rubbed his nose in the unpleasant reality. The very effrontery of the performance of Charles Haughey convinced even those close to him that it couldn't be true.

It should also be remembered that, despite the millions stumped up by the taxpayer for the Moriarty tribunal, its report adds little significant value to what the dogs already knew, other than establishing the sheer scale of the donations and elevating the uncertain into a presumption of guilt.

That has happened because the exquisite cellular secrecy operated by Haughey in life continues to cause problems after his death. But it's also happened because the model of smaller crooks like Ray Burke has been applied to him:

he was given X, therefore he must have given Y back. That never applied to Charles Haughey.

For some of the donors, the money given was effectively a fee paid in order to perceive themselves to be "well-got" with Haughey.

For some, it was a downpayment on future possibilities - an insurance policy to protect against some non-specific possible future threat.

For some, it was a flattering opportunity to play the role of sponsor to greatness, like a Renaissance merchant funding Michelangelo. Ridiculous in retrospect, but apparently an easy enough sell at the time.

That's the nub of the missing evidence of bribe-equals-delivery. Knowing the man had accepted their money was enough reciprocation for many of the givers. It made them feel important. (They might not have felt so important if they'd known they were just one of dozens of donor-smarties in a box rattled by Des Traynor. ) Charles Haughey, because he managed to make other ostensibly clever men share in his incredible sense of entitlement, turned gifts into something akin to the tribute a medieval monarch would expect. (He did this on a lesser scale, too. Like royalty, he never carried cash or credit cards, or at least never admitted to either.

On tours of constituencies, he would instruct local TDs to contribute on his behalf to charity collectors or buy a round for the lads. And they did.

They always did. ) What is fascinating is the voluntary nature of the widespread submission to the delusion.

Haughey was accepted as witty when, in retrospect, the evidence adduced amounts to little more than harsh and destructive profanity. He was accepted as cultured when his cultural nous was essentially subcontracted to figures like Anthony Cronin.

Above all, though, he was assumed to be a patriot and a nationalist. To embody, as the title of his collected speeches implied, the Spirit of the Nation. That assumption was demolished by one of Moriarty's findings, the one about the £50,000 paid by a Saudi sheikh for a horse that never existed, a horse described by the Saudi to TV3's Ursula Halligan as a "not spectacular" performer.

An Irish taoiseach involved the representative of the government of a powerful overseas nation in a conspiracy to convince anyone who asked that a non-existent horse had changed hands. The implicit danger to the state may be theoretical.

The disrespect to the nation he served is inescapable.

And the ultimate tragedy is that every one of those who contributed to that Euro45m arguably assisted a brilliant man to create a shared delusion, whereas reduction to the ranks of the insolvent might have allowed him to live in the real world and deliver on his real potential?