The prime minister announced his resignation last week, partly because of questionable financial dealings in the early 1990s, writes Fintan O'Toole.
He has, as one commentator said, "made a point of saying that any minister who could not offer a reasonable explanation of dubious financial dealings should resign. If he holds himself to the same standards, then he must have known he would face enormous difficulties."
The leader in question was Shinzo Abe of Japan. He was at the head of a party rather like Fianna Fáil, a conservative, nationalist and populist movement that holds an almost permanent grip on power. And the rather broad rules that Abe broke are pretty similar to the ones that seem to apply here now. The demand is not that government ministers have no dubious financial dealings, merely that they can offer a "reasonable explanation" of them.
A credible story is enough to keep you in power, but if you can't come up with one, you're out.
This rather lax standard is at the heart of Bertie Ahern's troubles. If we operated the normal standards of western democracies, he wouldn't have any troubles, because he'd be long gone. Amid all the confusions, evasions and shifting accounts, it is easy to forget that there is no dispute about the central reality that Bertie Ahern, as minister for finance, took large sums of cash from businessmen on four different occasions. The standard that's supposed to apply to this kind of thing was set out by Mr Justice Brian McCracken in 1997 in the report of the Dunnes payments tribunal.
It is, he wrote, "quite unacceptable that . . . any member of the Oireachtas should receive gifts of this nature . . . If such gifts were to be permissible, the potential for bribery and corruption would be enormous. If politicians are to give an effective service to all their constituents, or to all the citizens of the State, they must not be under a financial obligation to some constituents or some citizens only."
This standard is clear enough, and in a normal democracy the main story would be that Bertie Ahern repeatedly broke it. Why he did so - who gave him the money, what his personal financial circumstances happened to be - would be no more than an interesting footnote.
Bizarrely, however, we have allowed the footnote to become the main story and the main story to become an obscure annotation. This has happened for a number of reasons, including the timidity of the Opposition and the ambiguous standing of tribunals that have gone on too long and cost too much. But the main reason is that to accept the reality that nice Bertie behaved in an unacceptable way would cause many of us some grief. So we opted collectively for the Japanese standard instead: "a reasonable explanation of dubious financial dealings". Or, like the title of the Tim Hardin song, A Reason to Believe.
The implicit deal was rooted in the old sacrament of Confession. Bertie would get absolution in return for an earnest accounting for his sins and a firm purpose of amendment.
Bertie would save us the embarrassment of coming out and declaring that it's
fine for politicians to take wads of cash by giving us a good excuse. Its plausibility mattered more than its ultimate veracity.
If we were to have the wool pulled over our eyes, we wanted it to be fine merino rather than coarse yarn.
If we were going to be regaled with fictions, we'd have liked them to be Jane Austen rather than Jeffrey Archer.
If we were going to be treated to shaggy-dog stories, let them be pure-bred Great Danes rather than scruffy mongrels.
It is rather unfortunate, therefore, that while those involved in the financial transactions in question are undoubtedly telling the truth as they remember it, the truth turns out to be so implausible. This is a reality stranger than fiction.
Michael Wall, for example, reaches into his safe and for "no particular reason" pulls out £30,000 before heading off to Dublin. He has no idea what it is to be spent on, except that it was to refurbish a house he didn't own. He "just took a ballpoint pen figure of what might be needed" and brought it with him.
He is a great friend of Bertie Ahern but has "no idea he was going to be taoiseach" - a prediction that was all over the day's papers. He turns up at St Luke's and, without prior warning, puts wads of cash on the table.
But Bertie shows no surprise: "There was no particular reaction whatsoever." It was a "perfectly normal chat".
The Taoiseach survived the revelation of his acceptance of cash from businessmen because people see him as a soap opera character who is expected to get into scrapes. But even soap operas have to operate within the limits of plausibility.
It is rotten luck for the Taoiseach that the truth, as told so far, wouldn't pass muster on Fair City, Coronation Street or even Crossroads. And that characters the public stop believing in get written out of the script.