Rody Molloy's lotto win is lifted from the pages of the manual used to run this country for decades. It's about status, and a circling of wagons, and an interpretation of decency that is quite frankly indecent. More than anything, it illustrates a divide in Irish society that is at its starkest right now.

When reports of wholesale waste and incompetence at Fás emerged last November, Molloy was obliged to explain the culture he oversaw. He went on Pat Kenny's radio show and made a hames of it. He referenced his entitlements. A sense of entitlement permeated the upper echelons of politics and business right through the boom years. They believed their own bull. This was a great little nation, they were the captains, and weren't they entitled to live like kings? At the expense of the little people, of course.

But Molloy's performance at the hands of Kenny thrust him out beyond the cocoon which the elite inhabit. You don't talk about entitlements in front of the little people. He had become an embarrassment.

The Public Accounts Committee heard on Thursday that Tánaiste Mary Coughlan wanted rid of Molloy. There is no indication she was thus disposed over the revelations of waste and obscene expenses. What really did for him was the embarrassment he was causing. Like a loud, drunken aunt at a wedding, it was time for him to retire and allow the party to continue apace.

In a functioning democracy he would have been fired for gross incompetence. In this banana republic he was asked to retire early because he was embarrassing the government. He was handed a tax-free sum of €333,000 and his pension entitlements boosted to €111,000 per annum for the rest of his life. If he had been fired, he would have got €50,000 less in the lump sum and his annual whopper of a pension would have been down €11,000.

But he wasn't fired. He was quietly asked to go. And in order to assuage his embarrassment at the public humiliation, he was to be properly compensated in a pay-off worth over €1m. He "agreed to resign" but insisted he be "treated reasonably". If he didn't judge his treatment to be reasonable, he threatened to go to court.

The government didn't call his bluff. Here was a man being given an honourable way out of the mess he created for himself, and he was setting the terms of his departure. Crucially, no legal advice was sought to check whether Molloy would have a leg to stand on.

If a citizen is poisoned by a state agency, the government immediately arms itself with lawyers, and implicitly threatens the citizen with legal costs. A citizen who believes he or she was abused while in the care of the state receives similar treatment. Lawyers are waved in the face of citizens as if they were a bailiff en route to ransack a home.

Not in this case. Here, Mary Couglan's department didn't even seek legal advice. The person looking for compensation here was not some Josephine Soap citizen, but one of their own.

On Thursday a spokesman for the department said no advice was sought because it "was conscious of the costs associated with legal advice".

Who're they coddin'? Did they fear that the attorney general might charge overtime to the department if asked his opinion? What if the attorney or any lawyer told them something they might not want to hear? What if the advice was that they could get away without doling out hundreds of thousands to a departing employee who had overseen obscene waste of public money? Why wasn't he just fired?

Instead, a warped interpretation of decency was invoked. Molloy had moved in the rarified air with top civil servants, politicians and business people. Ok, he had become an embarrassment, but nobody was going to see the man wrong.

Like them, he had entitlements, and those entitlements didn't disappear just because he had been rumbled by the little people. Send him off with a golden handshake and a smile. For the 150,000 others who lost their jobs in the last 12 months, it must resemble nothing as much as winning the lotto on the way out.

Molloy's pay-off was negotiated by Fás chairman Peter McLoone, a trade unionist who moves comfortably in the upper echelons. He never once expressed disquiet at the process or pay-off awarded Molloy. These days, McLoone makes a lot of noise about the low-paid workers who are bearing the brunt of the recession, and how he will champion their cause. Does he have any grasp of irony?

It also emerged on Thursday that the board of Fás are now saying they were misled. They didn't know that hundreds of thousands were being thrown around like confetti. They are not responsible. Look, before your eyes, the rats fleeing the sinking ship. Once again, nobody is responsible for anything.

In the coming months, the same government that doled out money to Molloy will sit down to shape the budget. Increasing speculation suggests there will be cuts to wages and social welfare payments. The little people have to realise the country is in an awful mess and somebody has to pay for it.

We simply won't recover unless somebody takes the pain. If that means certain people will have to go under­nourished or do without proper heating in the winter, well, that's really terrible, but that's life. Are you listening, little people?

mclifford@tribune.ie