Even Fianna Fáilers are sick of their legacy of corruption and expediency

YOU know the way we become immune to things — even tragedies fail to move us when they are piled up over time. We become hardened and desensitised.

In the case of Northern Ireland, for example, thousands of people died without making us weep. It took certain kinds of events the Enniskillen or Shankill massacres, the Warrington bombs to jolt us out of the complacency that familiarity created.

Isn't it the same with Fianna Fáil? Aren't they incredibly lucky that so much has happened over so long a time, that we have all been able to absorb it and adapt to it? We are almost immune by now to the sense of shock that a new revelation about Fianna Fáil should be able to bring. And the essential reason for that is because there have been so many revelations over so long a period.

Last week we learned that in the middle of November the Criminal Assets Bureau had served a bill on Ray Burke for €2 million in respect of tax he should have paid on all the bribes he received. The CAB calling on Ray Burke could have marked the anniversary of another defining event. In the middle of November 12 years ago November 16, 1991 Charles Haughey received a visitor to his home, none other than the supermarket magnate Ben Dunne.

Charlie was depressed about money at the time, to such an extent that Dunne felt he had to do something for him. So he dug into the back pocket of his golf trousers and handed Charlie three bank drafts totalling €266,000. As we all know now, all Charlie said was "thanks a million, big fella".

So it has taken 12 years, if you like, for the wheel to turn full circle. And what a series of events have marked that 12 years, from Ben Dunne's gift to Charlie Haughey to the CAB visit to Ray Burke.

If even those two things had happened within a short space of time, and of course if we had known about them when they happened in real time, as it were would they not have rocked Fianna Fáil to its foundations and beyond? All we had about Fianna Fáil then was a series of suspicions about Charlie Haughey.

At the time he received his (then) secret visit from Ben Dunne, he had been through a number of scandals. The year of the golden circle, as it was known, had associated Haughey with a variety of apparently dodgy business dealings. But despite the best efforts of the opposition and the media, no-one was ever able to prove any of the connections to the point where CJH was finally exposed. A week before he took Dunne's money, he had successfully faced down a challenge from Albert Reynolds, defeating a motion of no confidence by 55 votes to 22.

On December 5, 1991, with Dunne's money still burning a hole in his pocket, Charlie Haughey had held a secret meeting with John Major which was in many ways to be the formal start of the peace process.

Papers changed hands between the British and Irish governments, and these papers were ultimately to become the basis on which the Downing Street Declaration and finally the Good Friday Agreement were based.

In the end, as we know, it was an old scandal that did Haughey in. Sean Doherty, who had remained silent for ten years about who knew what in relation to the tapping of journalist's phones, finally revealed that Haughey had been involved all along.

Despite his denials, he found himself forced to resign, because his government partners the PDs could stomach no more. But he was still able to stand in the Dáil with no one to rebut him and intone in that grandiloquent way of his that he "had done the State some service".

It was only after he was gone that the real truth began to come out.

Not only he, but other senior figures in the party, had taken millions of pounds in bribes over many years.

They had treated the planning process, especially in Dublin, as a sort of plaything to be corrupted at will. Haughey's closest associate and financial helpmate had operated a private bank, enabling hundreds of well-to-do Irish citizens to evade tax, using the proceeds to bankroll Haughey's lifestyle.

Side by side with all this, a series of political upheavals dominated the years after Haughey, consuming his successors and dominating politics for several years. We now know as a matter of fact that at the highest level Fianna Fáil was a deeply corrupt political party.

Yet it has ground on, living down scandal after scandal, and being forgiven by the electorate for all the sins of the recent past even though opinion polls reveal that people still don't believe the party is innocent of all knowledge of these things, as they have claimed.

WHEN you consider what the image of sleaze did to the Christian Democrats in Italy or the Tory Party in Britain, it has been a most remarkable survival. Time, as I said, has helped a lot.

Imagine what the effect on all of us would have been if all the events of the last 12 years had been telescoped into, say, two. Day after day, the party would have been forced to confront its past instead of gliding over it. It simply wouldn't have been possible for the party to keep grinding on, maintaining the careful distance between its former heroes and its present.

The re-emergence of Ray Burke reminds us or at least it ought to remind us that Bertie Ahern once remarked that persistent questioning of his then Foreign Minister amounted to the "hounding of an honourable man". The decision to appoint Burke to his first Cabinet as Taoiseach remains one of the great question marks about Ahern's own judgment.

But the party has survived it all, even emerging again as the great winner of the last election. It does look now though as if the wheels have started to come off. In the week of the Budget, we will all be reminded once more that Fianna Fáil won the election by making a series of promises they never intended to keep.

Leaving the staggering revelations of corruption to one side, the style of politics they have perfected is a unique form of political pragmatism, founded by Haughey and perfected by Ahern and McCreevy. In Fianna Fáil politics, vision is whatever gets you to the end of the week, and tactics are the only thing that really matter.

Not only have they, it seems, been found out by the people, but the internal coherence of the party has finally begun to crack under the strain of all the pressures of the more distant past, and all the policy contradictions of the recent past.

Bertie Ahern's leadership is now being openly talked about within the party but more to the point, there is a substantial number of Fianna Fáil people who are beginning to think that a period of renewal and cleansing, under a new leader, would be not only necessary but good. And so say all of us.