It is 1986, and for 14 years now Charles Haughey, leader of the opposition, has been conducting an affair with a journalist, Terry Keane. They have sipped Cristal champagne in expensive restaurants. They have slept together in the luxury apartments of the property developers and tycoons who are his natural allies. They have enjoyed the sights of London, the galleries of Paris and the fresh air of Inishvickillaun together.

They have dined together at fashionable dinner parties in Dublin, where their fellow guests, perhaps flattered by this proof that they are really in the know, can be relied upon to be discreet. They have even worried together about her possible pregnancy and the terrible choices it might force on them.

And now Ireland is beginning to change. Many people are tired of hypocrisy and of the pretence that people always live up to the standards set by church and State. Many people feel that the time has come to make a clear separation between the teachings of Catholic morality and the law of the land. The Fine Gael-Labour government proposes a referendum to remove the prohibition on divorce.

One man more than any other has the power to influence the vote on this proposal. As the leader of the largest party and the one most in touch with the conservative heartland, Charles Haughey carries a great deal of personal authority. He does not have to come out and tell the nation about his own complicated personal situation, and his own failure to live up to his marriage vows.

All he has to say is that real life is not simple, that people should be given a chance to make up for their failures. Or at least that he has nothing to say, that people should make up their own minds. Since Fianna Fail has decided not to adopt a formal position on the referendum, he is perfectly free to take this latter course.

Instead, however, he issues what is, as he makes clear, a personal statement. It represents, he stresses, "a purely personal view". He has, he tells the nation, "an unshakeable belief in the importance of having the family as a basic unit of society. My experience of life tells me that this is the best way in which to organise a society."

In his statement, Charles Haughey acknowledges "that the family is no longer the universally accepted unit" in "many parts of our modern world". But he makes it clear that this lax modernism has no place in his own heart: "Of course, it has an appeal for some individuals, the attraction of superficial freedom. But, in my view, the family is a great buttress for the individual. The family is a support system. The family is a natural grouping . . . The family is an anchor for the individual, a haven of security and support. I give that as my purely personal view." And so on and on, through "the stability of marriage" and "the rights of existing family members".

When Charles Haughey made this "purely personal" statement, based on his "experience of life", almost everybody involved in politics and the media knew he was a brazen hypocrite. It was widely believed in media circles that he had, in fact, returned from Paris with Terry Keane on the weekend before he issued this call to defend traditional family values.

WHY did no one challenge him in public? Fear, in part, especially for media professionals who knew that such an allegation would be almost impossible to prove in a libel action. But, mostly, a proper reticence. It wasn't fear that made the press photographers, according to Terry Keane, "lower their cameras" when Haughey, newly elected Taoiseach, kissed her in full public view in Leinster House. Few people had the stomach for the kind of sex-and-sleaze scandal-mongering that had debased public life in Britain. Even though Haughey had chosen to make a political issue of his "experience of life", and to pontificate on family values, it seemed more decent to step back and try to debate the broader issues.

And there was something else as well: the sheer, breathtaking brass neck of it all. Just as Haughey got away with financial irregularity by making his wealth utterly obvious, so the fantastic arrogance of his mock-morality reduced his critics to open-mouthed silence. The lie was so big that exposing it seemed a monumental step to take.

And yet, now that the noisiest cat in Irish political history is out of the bag, it all seems so laughable. The misery that Haughey caused by preventing proper access to contraception, the unhappiness he perpetuated by helping to defeat the divorce referendum in 1986, has faded into history. What's left is almost pure hilarity. For no one, not even the late Dermot Morgan who mocked him so brilliantly on Scrap Saturday, could have created such a devastating satiric portrait of Haughey as his lover Terry Keane did in the Sunday Times.

There are some serious aspects of Keane's story. Her allegation that she was able to influence the appointment of a judge (and we have, of course, only her own claims in this regard) cast a sickly light on the much-vaunted "separation of powers". Her suggestion that some of the businessmen whose names have been mentioned in various tribunals were in on Haughey's personal secrets may prove interesting.

But it's the moments when Mills and Boon meet de Valera and the Christian Brothers that bring tears of laughter to the eyes. Nobody has ever caught Haughey's mixture of cod-mysticism and brazen opportunism so perfectly. Haughey's Spirit of the Nation speeches to Fianna Fail ardfheiseanna take on a whole new flavour of glorious absurdity in Keane's breathless prose. "He layered me (sic) with Irishness. To him, I was Terry O'Donnell, whose clan was from Donegal, and he would recount stories about what the O'Donnells said to the O'Neills. There was an element of Lady Chatterley and her lover about it."

One moment the faithful gallowglass, telling tales of dauntless Red Hugh and his tragic fight against the Saxons, the next the virile gamekeeper Mellors rogering the lady of the manor. All this and his profound personal attachment to the history, economy and banking system of the Cayman Islands. Was there no end to the man's cultural adaptability?

And then there is the epic AngloIrish romance in which she plays Maud Gonne to his W.B. Yeats and the once and future Taoiseach finds uses for the Irish language beyond the cupla focail at the start of a speech: "I knew the stories on England, the English poets. He knew everything about Ireland. He would talk to me of Irish history. He would have me spellbound with the ancient Gaelic myths. To illustrate a point or tell me how much he loved me, he would quote from memory lengthy poems in English or as gaeilge."

At least the party faithful were not the only ones mesmerised by Haughey's spinning of myths. And perhaps having a head full of poems and stories explains his inability to recall huge donations from Ben Dunne until the McCracken tribunal confronted him with incontrovertible evidence.

The only pity is that it took so long for so many people to see the obvious truth behind the lies, a truth so plain that even his starry-eyed lover could see it. As Terry Keane tells us: "Charlie always had the uncomplicated belief that the greater good was served by him getting what he wanted." In that, if in nothing else, his private life was completely in keeping with his public record.