Predictably, Mr Charles Haughey was not present at the weekend to witness his life and times being dissected at a conference in UCC.
The theme was Government, Politics and Society in the Haughey Years and speaker after speaker pulled no punches when summing up his contribution to Irish politics and the legacy he has left behind.
Fintan O'Toole, an Irish Times columnist, had this to say: "The hypocrisy evident in the gap between his patriotic rhetoric and his unprincipled practice strengthens the notion that he merely used ideology as a convenient cover for self-enrichment, and the damage he continues to do to Fianna Fail seems to underline the long-held belief that his divisiveness was a disaster for his party.
"Haughey's practice was not really at odds with his fundamental ideology. Rather, the distance between one and the other was itself an ideology. It expressed the essence of Haughey's ideological project, which was precisely the maintenance of a gap between, on the one hand, the practice of self-enrichment in a capitalist democracy, and on the other, the language of mystical nationalism which served to obfuscate that reality."
The political editor of the Sunday Tribune, Stephen Collins, said that Mr Haughey's hold over his party was based on fear and intimidation and people were terrified of his wrath. He managed to retain a hold over the party because of the fanatical support he enjoyed within the parliamentary party, the Fianna Fail organisation, the media and the general public.
Upon his election, his fitness for office was questioned by Garret FitzGerald but rather than examining the truth of this assertion, the media rounded on Fine Gael.
In his third term of office from 1987 to 1992, Mr Haughey presided over an economy which had been brought back on the rails, but behind the scenes "he was tapping some of Ireland's leading business people for vast sums of money".
Mr Collins added that Mr Haughey's ultimate failure was to have dragged the reputation of Irish politics into the mud as a result of the scandals that emerged after his departure from office.
The chairman of UCC's governing Body, Prof Enda McDonagh, said the decline in public ethics in recent times in Ireland, not only during the Haughey years, could never be completely analysed and understood - "although the investigations must go on".
He added: "Yet it is time to consider how a new public ethic may be generated, communicated and implemented if Ireland is to become a reputable and equitable democracy and republic."
Dealing with the arms crisis in which Mr Haughey was a central figure, Mr Michael Mills, a former Irish Press political correspondent and the first ombudsman, said that from the day of his acquittal by the courts, Mr Haughey never spoke again of the arms crisis and avoided all efforts by journalists to question him, even to the extent of threatening to walk off the set if any television interviewer raised the question.