The country's response to the death of Charles Haughey mirrored its reaction to him during his life, writes Stephen Collins.
Fianna Fáil forgave everything; the media's fascination was all consuming and the people remained deeply divided about the man who had led the State three times and dominated political life for a generation.
The contrast with the State funeral of Jack Lynch seven years ago was pointed. Fianna Fáil and the media were polite and restrained when Mr Lynch died and, while there was an outpouring of affection in his home city of Cork, the sense of occasion was very different, more down to earth.
When Mr Haughey died on Tuesday the media and the apparatus of the State responded as if he was still in office. There was blanket coverage on television, radio and the newspapers, while the Taoiseach's department organised the funeral arrangements and the media facilities with the precision normally applied to an EU summit.
One of the reasons for the difference between the two State funerals was summed up at the removal service by Fr Eoghan Haughey who described his late brother as a man "who dominated and fascinated the age in which he lived probably more than any politician of his time".
The question that arises is why Mr Haughey dominated and fascinated to such an extent.
In terms of ability and dynamism, Charles Haughey was undoubtedly head and shoulders above all his contemporaries but a cold analysis of his political career would suggest that his political judgement was deeply and sometimes dangerously flawed.
His lavish lifestyle, which certainly contributed to the fascination with him, provided a dramatic contrast to the lives of ordinary people. Paradoxically, he had an enduring appeal to the segment of the electorate that was conservative, Catholic and nationalist.
The vast majority of Fianna Fáil supporters were the very people most removed from his lifestyle and his social ambitions, yet he had an intense emotional appeal for them.
On the face of it, Jack Lynch would have appeared to be a more authentic representative of the Fianna Fáil heartland, a hurling legend with simple tastes who lived a modest lifestyle.
On visits home to Cork when he was taoiseach, Lynch liked nothing better than to spend an evening in the clubhouse of Glen Rovers, playing whist or 25 while drinking a few Paddies. It was a far cry from Mr Haughey's Gandon mansion, the horses and the champagne.
Yet it was Mr Haughey and his notions of grandeur that so many of the Fianna Fáil faithful adored and the media indulged. His nationalist rhetoric and his abiding anti-English sentiment was undoubtedly a large part of that appeal while his pose as a man of destiny was a magnetic attraction for the party faithful who were prepared to forgive him almost anything.
The contrast between the two men was never more stark than in their response to the crisis in the North in 1969 and 1970.
Mr Lynch struggled to come to terms with the eruption of violence and his lack of decisiveness in the early stages of what became known as the Arms Crisis was a contributing factor in its development.
For all that, he managed to pilot the state through the most difficult period since the Civil War when things could so easily have slipped out of control.
Mr Haughey took a different course and flirted with dangerous forces of atavistic nationalism that would almost certainly have brought disaster down on the country.
Yet many Fianna Fáil supporters were disappointed by Mr Lynch's caution and enthralled by Mr Haughey's recklessness. A large part of Mr Haughey's enduring appeal within the party was precisely the dangerous course he had taken in 1970.
The carnage in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s when unbridled ethnic nationalist forces were unloosed is a warning of what might have happened if Mr Lynch had lost control in 1970.
The events of 1970 left an enduring mark on Fianna Fáil but the faction that lost the battle in the Arms Crisis ultimately won the war for control of the party in 1979. Mr Haughey's accession to power came as a severe jolt to the party establishment that had backed Mr Lynch but it was widely popular within the ranks of the party. The frenzied excitement of his first ardfheis was testament to that.
If the Fianna Fáil faithful have always been in thrall to Mr Haughey's appeal, a significant segment of the public has always been resistant to his charms. While Jack Lynch won two out of three general elections and brought Fianna Fáil to its greatest ever election victory in 1977, Mr Haughey struggled to achieve power.
He narrowly lost his first election as leader and never managed to achieve an overall majority. It was no accident that Fine Gael achieved the best election results in the party's history when the "Haughey factor" polarised public opinion in the early 1980s.
At all stages of his political career the media was obsessed with Haughey and, while his family felt that he got a hard time, the unremitting attention was something that he clearly revelled in. In any case, while he certainly had enemies in the media, he also had friends who rarely wavered in their support for him.
His performance as taoiseach after 1987 certainly enhanced his reputation with solid achievement after earlier failures but the story of how Mr Haughey had achieved his great wealth only emerged in his retirement. It shocked the public but while it certainly caused embarrassment to his followers, it did not really shake their faith in him. The outpouring of sentiment in recent days is a reflection of that.
In his graveside oration Taoiseach Bertie Ahern referred to his mentor's record of lasting achievement and concluded: "Immersed in his many political battles Charles Haughey would ruefully acknowledge to me that he enjoyed the proverbial nine lives, Charlie, Boss, the last of those lives has now been extinguished. Today the most agile and distinctive of our political leaders is still." There is little argument with that.