In Dublin Castle, which heaves with so-called 'millionaire tribunal-lawyers', picking out the rural TD is a cinch. He's the richest-looking one of all. His suit radiates the sheen you see in Louis Copeland's window. His watch throws off showers of sparkles. His pastel tie accentuates his tan.

"Nice tan, Deputy Lowry. Been away?" we enquire. He says something about "Portugal and then down to Marbella", before leaving the building, past a gigantic portrait of a scarlet-jacketed King George III astride a white charger.

Deputy Lowry, along with the rest of his Oireachtas colleagues, was still on his Easter holliers when he popped into the castle on Tuesday morning to watch his English solicitor, Christopher Vaughan, a crumpled Rumpolesque figure from Northampton, give evidence about a farm in Mansfield and an old reform church in Cheadle that he conveyed for the "Irish member of parliament", as he alluded to Lowry. Judging by the backbencher's tan, he hadn't hung around the Emerald Isle for the parade to celebrate the 93rd anniversary of the Rising. In glorious sunshine on Easter Sunday, the president had laid a wreath outside the GPO, a young soldier read the Proclamation aloud and the band played Amhrán na bhFiann. The day had been a comforting interlude of glad-to-be-Irish-ness in the midst of our awful ructions.

It took Willie O'Dea, as it often does, to break the spell. Asked what Pearse and his fellow blood-sacrifice patriots would say about Ireland today, the defence minister cogitated long and hard and delivered himself of the opinion: "I'm sure that one of the things they would probably say is that the government was justified in taking measures to secure the financial solvency of the state."

Perhaps it is the proximity of the Moriarty tribunal hearing rooms in the upper yard to the Mahon tribunal hearing rooms in the lower yard of the castle that brought to mind the summary of modern Ireland by the minister from Limerick, a city under siege by drugs criminals. This time last year, the Taoiseach of the day ? Willie's boss ? was bouncing in and out of the lower yard to dodge more questions than the bullets his poor hero Pearse ever managed to elude. Ahern waxed Bertie-ish about his ties with Manchester, so strong that, when he was minister for finance, he went over there to give dissertations on the Irish economy and, feeling sorry for the craytur, his audience did a whipround for him.

Ahern's star turn in the castle was the no-frills Anorak Man version of his predecessor's twirl at the McCracken tribunal when the citizens learned of Haughey's romantic soirées in Paris and his monogrammed, hand-stitched Charvet shirts. Brian Cowen, with his modest leasing arrange­ment for property in Leeds, is only trotting after them. But trotting, nonetheless.

Into these troubled reveries at the Moriarty tribunal on Tuesday intruded the voice of Mr Vaughan. He was reminiscing in the witness box about how Lowry (owner of four off-shore bank accounts) had impressed him during a meeting in his Northampton home in 1996 and how he had offered to drive the TD to Leicester the next day for his scheduled "appointment for a Bupa medical check-up".

You might expect that this nugget jolted the audience into animated wonder, but no. Here was a politician only recently departed from the cabinet table travelling abroad for his medical care while his constituents were lumped with a service most kindly described as "third-world". The revelation excited not as much as a twitch in the room. Have we become so numbed by politicians' hypocrisy we don't see it any more?

Last week, while Gordon Brown was abolishing second-home allowances for British MPs, Brian Lenihan was reneging on his budget measure to cancel long-service increments for TDs and pension payments to serving deputies. Why? Because, if he didn't, there would be mutiny inside Leinster House. TDs have their hundred-grand salaries and their bottomless pit of perks for a job that takes up fewer than 100 days in the year and the odd 'Tá' or 'Níl' in the voting lobbies. They are spoilt.

Such riches isolate them from the hardships afflicting their constituents and are likely to attract the wrong sort into national politics: the sort who thinks money is more important than integrity in this state built on a rebellion of poets.

As they scold their constituents for buying Pampers and Band Aids in Newry, our modern patriots cling jealously to their own emoluments and shriek "No surrender".

If you've ever wondered why TDs deserve to be so lavishly remunerated, it's for the rare skill of being able to talk out both sides of their mouths at once.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie