On the day Charles Haughey was making the first payment to his exclusive Paris shirt-makers in February 1991, unemployment reached a disastrous new high. At the end of January in that year, 234,467 people were on the live register, a jump of almost 5,000 over the previous month and the highest level in five years. More than 100,000 had been out of work for more than a year.

At the time, the basic payment made to the short-term unemployed was £45 a week. Yet Mr Haughey had just remitted £8,332.32p in payment for his shirts to the Charvet company in the Place Vendome.

The Ireland of 1991 had yet to hear the growl of the Celtic Tiger and the State was still top of all the leagues it didn't want to be. The Republic had the second highest debt and the highest real unemployment (18.5 per cent) in the EU.

Bus fares went up by 16 per cent and the ICTU reported that seven out of 10 young workers were low paid. The hospitals were in crisis and three health boards were refusing to accept their budgets, saying they were inadequate. The waiting lists for mental health treatment had doubled and the construction of Tallaght hospital was postponed yet again.

The Government proposed closing down three university teacher-training schools as a cost-saving measure. Dublin Gas announced it was pulling out of Ballymun "for economic reasons".

Later that year, Ireland Inc was still wearing the hairshirt imposed by Mr Haughey's Government, but the Taoiseach was moved to send Charvet a second cheque for shirts made of the finest Egyptian cotton that September. Some £7,500 was paid over, using a cheque drawn on the Fianna Fail leader's account.

By then, the State was enmeshed in scandal. Every day that autumn, the newspapers were filled with fresh revelations about Telecom, Greencore or Carysfort. Mr Haug hey never took the fire directly, but his circle of friends and appointees were heavily involved. The only times the Taoiseach's exquisitely-attired figure did appear in photographs, it was at the launch of a book or the opening of an artist's village in Co Kerry.

The week after Mr Haughey made his second payment to Charvet, the general secretary of ICTU, Peter Cassells, attacked the Government's record on tax collection. We can see now that Mr Cassells was uncannily accurate in his remarks.

Tax avoidance and evasion were costing the State tens of millions of pounds every year, Mr Cassells claimed, and "well-heeled cheats" were directly responsible for closing hospital wards, taking teachers out of classrooms and threatening the wages of nurses, gardai and ambulance-drivers by failing to pay their fair share of tax.

"It would be more productive for the Department of Finance to look into the bank accounts of some of the wealthiest people in this country than to dip into the pay-packets of low-paid public servants." Sounds familiar?

Recent disclosures about shelf and offshore companies set up "purely for tax purposes" were only "the tip of the iceberg", he thundered.

The Revenue Commissioners had just reported that only 5,100 of the State-self-employed workers were recorded as earning over £25,000 a year, yet this category included doctors, barristers, farmers, dentists, auctioneers, publicans, consultants and a wide range of business people.

Also in September 1991, the film, The Commitments, received its premiere in Dublin, with its oft-quoted line about Irish people being the blacks of Europe, and Dubliners being the blacks of Ireland, and north-siders being the blacks of Dublin. Given the subsequent revelations about Mr Haughey, perhaps we should read "patsies" for "blacks".