It's 30 years ago, but Jack Jones still remembers that his colleague ┴ine O'Donoghue was wearing a red suit when she emerged in tears from their bank manager's office. The 1971 bank strike had just ended - "the only time we had ever been able to run the business in peace and quiet", she says wryly - and they had been summoned by their bank to account for a pile of cheques "this high".

For MRBI, it was a day of reckoning. Jones, the managing director, had £7 in his pocket, which he used to buy lunch for himself and his tearful director.

It was an optimistic gesture for a man with a wife and five children, but he was right. MRBI, Ireland's first indigenous polling company, set up in 1962 by Jones and Padraig Ferguson, would survive, thanks to that AIB manager, who let them keep two-thirds of their revenue to run the company and carry on to chart the fast-shifting ground of public opinion for a new Ireland.

In 1972, they organised a presentation for an invited audience, involving three real case studies. The people behind the organisations, who had already copped on to the potential of what was then a new-fangled business, are worth recording: Feargal Quinn of Superquinn; Sean J. White, PR and publicity manager of CIE; and a priest - Father Farrell Sheridan of the Holy Ghost Order.

No politicians. It would be another year before Garret FitzGerald and Richie Ryan would commission research for the 1972 general election. They were back within months for the presidential campaign shaping up between Fine Gael's Thomas O'Higgins and Fianna Fβil's Erskine Childers.

O'Donoghue remembers how more than a whiff of the Civil War hung over that election. "It was very definitely Civil War politics. Again and again, I'd have noticed that in the briefings we'd be getting . . ." How far we've come. Now, according to MRBI, not only is an FF/FG coalition perceived as an option like any other, but support for it is highest among FF and FG supporters.

In 1987, the Catholic Church was the major influence for half of us on issues such as divorce and abortion; now it's a factor for a quarter of us. Only 68 per cent of us would miss it if it disappeared, which, on MRBI's checklist, places it below the trees in the countryside, the Garda S∅ochβna and work, but above television and the pub.

And no one should be complacent about the pub coming bottom. In 1987, half of all 18- to 24-year-olds claimed that the pub was important in their lives; today a staggering 85 per cent feel that way.

MRBI can tell us all this because, on its 25th anniversary in 1987, it conducted a study to get its own perspective on Irish society. This year, it went back with the same questions. Although we are prouder, more patriotic and happier than we were 14 years ago, and see ourselves as more hard-working, we are, we believe, significantly less generous and less Christian. Our great influences now emanate from home and family. And despite raging controversies, such as the asylum seeker issue, our interest in world affairs has remained almost static.

Then again, some 35 per cent of us are so disillusioned/apathetic/ complacent that we can't even be bothered to vote. Why? It's one of the few questions for which Jones has no answer.

Yet, to anyone reading his new book, tracking Irish attitudes for nearly 30 years, the impression is of a sophisticated electorate, more subtle and nuanced in our responses to the great issues of the day, a people which refuses to be rail-roaded and is prepared to stick the boot in when suspecting a stroke too far.

Famous public whippings jump off the pages, reminding us that we are no confederacy of dunces. Remember Charles Haughey's 1982 "masterstroke", when he appointed the sitting FG TD, Dick Burke, to Brussels? In this scheme, the well-known FF candidate, Eileen Lemass, was to be a shoo-in.

In the event, it ended with the election of Fine Gael's Liam Skelly, a total unknown who happened to match an "ideal candidate" constructed by MRBI. It wasn't Lemass's fault, says Jack Jones; the writing was on the wall when the polls showed her support plummeting in direct proportion to the rise in her party leader's photo-calls. The electorate simply took revenge on those responsible for calling an unnecessary election and swamping the constituency with Ministerial Mercedes (Jones counted seven Ministers there in a single afternoon), when their occupants should have been back in the office, digging us out of national penury.

Haughey called another unnecessary election in 1989, losing four seats and forcing the party into coalition. Albert Reynolds did it in 1992; this time, the party got its lowest vote since 1927.

And let's not forget the referendums. "People will not be rail-roaded when something is unclear," says O'Donoghue. "Three weeks before the Nice referendum, we found that 50 per cent of the people were confused and just didn't understand enough about the issues. What happens then is that they vote 'No'."

In which case, the Government should be mighty careful with its abortion proposals. The signals are there in an MRBI/TG4 poll, taken in Sligo-Leitrim last week, which threw up 35 per cent undecided on the issue.

But can they explain how this savvy electorate can remain so impervious to political scandals? The mundane fact is, says O'Donoghue, that we have short memories. And there is what Jack Jones, with a philosophical shrug, calls "the Bertie phenomenon . . . this extraordinary ability of his to distance himself from adversity". At the height of the Haughey/Burke revelations, Fianna Fβil's support went up six points; Ahern's rating as Taoiseach was the highest ever recorded.

But is the price being paid elsewhere? In 1981, 76 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote; in 1997, it was just 65 per cent. Two out of three people believe the main reason people do not vote now is because they've lost respect for politicians. Are they right? Not even MRBI can answer that, although Jack Jones reckons it's because "people are smug, happy, times are good and they're just not interested".

But the search for an answer intensified after MRBI's rather humiliating election-day poll in 1997. After interviewing people in their homes who had already voted or said they were definitely going to vote, they found that their poll had overstated FF support by five points compared with the election results.

The reason why became clear when the completed questionnaires were scrutinised later. Among those who had already voted, the result was identical to the election result - i.e. they had told the truth. But those who had not already voted had not only grossly overstated their support for FF, they hadn't even gone out to vote in the end.

So they lied? "They tell the truth as they see it. They believe they're going to vote," says O'Donoghue charitably. "And there is a tendency in that situation to want to be seen to be supporting the party they see as the winner . . . But the important thing is that they don't bother going out to vote."

Since then, MRBI has devoted many months, high technology and various tricks, such as hiding questions in apparently unrelated surveys, to get at the truth. But they haven't cracked how to separate the true undecideds or the ones who get side-tracked on the day, from the 10 to 11 per cent who have no intention of voting to begin with.

In an odd way, the 1997 experience served to highlight how respected pollsters such as MRBI and IMS have assumed a position of public trust.

Their hard-built reputation is what keeps them in business, and anyone who questions their integrity must take the fall-out.

A week after the roller-coaster 1986 divorce referendum (lost 63:37), Bishop Brendan Comiskey wrote in the Wexford People: "The opinion polls have brought further discredit on an already discredited trade. The polls have not only got it wrong about the outcome of the divorce referendum, but they were used to manipulate people . . ."

Jack Jones replied to the bishop, privately, pointing out that MRBI's record had been "remarkably accurate . . . We would never undertake a project that we felt would be used to influence the public, and I do not accept, as you may have implied, that publication per se, means manipulation." He asked the bishop to correct the "false impression" that he had given, which had been published.

Four months later, in a private letter, the bishop conceded, "that if there is any error associated with the surveys, it seems to be an error of interpretation by people like myself, who do not heed the advice and the warnings of the organisations themselves". He promised to set the record straight publicly "at the first opportunity".

Fourteen years on, the bishop still hasn't done so. Jones, a courtly, conservative gentleman, feels justified now in making the matter public.

He could hardly feel otherwise, as he looks back on nearly a lifetime - begun with a stint in the Irish army which he left as a captain - dedicated to this profession.

In the meantime, he and O'Donoghue have served as joint managing directors of MRBI, then as chairman and sole MD respectively, until selling out to a UK-based company. But MRBI has retained its distinct identity, and the two still serve as chairman and director. Did they make money from the deal? O'Donoghue, whose main challenge now is her golf, grins: "We're comfortable - we're grand".

Jones says, "We got its value, we got what we wanted . . .", adding quickly, "Did you notice there are 23 pages of appendices in the book?"

In Your Opinion: Political and Social Trends in Ireland Through the EByes of the Electorate, by Jack Jones, with a forward by Dick Walsh, is published by TownHouse, £25