Fianna Fail used to be called the party of the open-necked shirts - to remind us of its poor beginnings. The joke of the week is that the shirts Charles Haughey wore were silk, handstitched - made to match his Napoleonic ambitions. It's a far cry from Bruree to the Place Vendome.
But the joke's on us.
The man for whom the shirts were made was the Taoiseach of the day. The man who signed the cheques that paid for them is Taoiseach now. And the funds that went to meet the cheques were ours.
Some still think that Haughey's spending was a bit of a laugh. Ben Dunne and other rich - though not necessarily foolish - cronies paid for a lot of it.
Which means, the macho admirers say, that it didn't cost the rest of us a penny, though the bill for shirts came to more than a nurse or train driver earned in a year. Much more than a pensioner or someone with a disability could expect.
But Ben Dunne, Larry Goodman and others among the rich and powerful didn't pay for the shirts. We did. The money came from the leader's allowance, which is funded by the State - from taxes paid by nurses, train drivers and the rest - to oil the wheels of parliamentary democracy.
That's why Bertie Ahern had to sign the cheque: as party treasurer, he was joint holder of the account into which the allowance was paid.
Joint signatures were needed for reassurance. But never was an accountant as incurious as Ahern seems to have been about the cheques he signed or where the money was spent.
Two of the cheques, made out to cash, were for almost £26,000, which Haughey handed to John Ellis, a TD for Sligo-Leitrim who was in danger of being declared bankrupt.
Strangely, Ellis says Haughey knew of the threat before he did. But had he become a bankrupt, Ellis would have been ineligible for membership of the Dail.
But, as we've seen, much that seemed mysterious during Haughey's reign is now explained, not merely by Napoleonic ambition but by his personal finances and the need to have and hold power.
The man who decried revisionism and despised revisionists is making both essential to an understanding of the way we were and, for that matter, the way we are.
To some of Haughey's macho admirers the spending went with the imperious manner; it was part of the style. So a chain is formed which began with tax concessions to artists and ended with Ansbacher.
To judge by some commentaries this week, you could almost describe the affairs unravelling in the hands of Mr Justice Moriarty and his staff as a series of strokes: boys, oh boys, weren't Haughey and Traynor the cute hoors to have thought of it?
Anyway, they say, it was all so far in the past we can afford to be funny about it now. If you believe that, you must have a short memory, a strange sense of humour or a trusting nature. Unfortunately, Bertie Ahern seems to have all three.
Liam Cosgrave once said, in a speech about the arms crisis of 1970, that something had gone wrong in Fianna Fail and "it'll take a generation to weed it out or breed it out".
It may take longer. Ahern and his colleagues are making no fist at all of the cleansing that Cosgrave - and many of different political persuasions - thought necessary.
It's little more than two years since Ahern insisted on appointing Ray Burke to his Cabinet. The Taoiseach defended the choice and Burke's attempts to stay in office.
When Padraig Flynn's appearance on the Late Late Show provoked Tom Gil martin and the devil of a row, he tried - and failed miserably - to give an account of his own meetings with the developer.
But, most significantly, he defended Haughey tooth and nail in the debate that preceded the establishment of the Moriarty tribunal. Dick Spring thought the terms being set were too limited and proposed a startlingly simple approach. The tribunal, he wrote, should ask: "Where did the money come from to maintain Mr Haughey's lifestyle over the years? Who contributed? Having established that, the next question to ask is `why?' "
Ahern's reply, in the Dail on September 10th, 1997, referred specifically to the leader's allowance:
"I am satisfied, having spoken to the person who administered the account, that it was used for bona-fide party purposes, that the cheques were prepared by that person and countersigned by another senior party member. Their purpose was to finance personnel, press and other normal supports for an Opposition leader. There was no surplus and no misappropriation."
He did not say that the senior party member who countersigned the cheques was himself. Did he not know, then, of the payments disclosed this week? Or did he think they were among the "normal supports for an Opposition leader"?
And does he still stand by the answer he gave on RTE radio when asked in January last year if he was worried that the Moriarty tribunal would bring further revelations about Haughey's finances?
"Personally, of course," he said, "I do not want to see any more fall on the head of Charlie Haughey. He's a good man who served the country well and I think he's taken a heck of a lot of knocks and he is getting older."
At least the last bit of that final sentence is undeniable.
As I write, Charlie McCreevy is on the radio, talking tough about the nurses' strike, stiffening the resolution of those who intend to join the SIPTU demonstrations against tax evaders.
It's as if the news from Dublin Castle and the Public Accounts Committee were not enough to get them out. As if they were not aware of the right-wing lobby already at work on public and political opinion in advance of the Budget, the new round of negotiations on social partnership and the national plan.
The week began with Sean Barrett of the department of economics at Trinity College casting derision on "the school of poverty studies which insists that a third of the nation lives in poverty". The claim, he said, would still be made "if we all doubled our incomes".
It might, but then his audience at the Hospital Consultants' Association is a damn sight more likely to get a fat increase than the people he was talking about at the other end of the scale.
If the consultants are interested in a more rational account of increasing poverty in this State, they should turn to a paper given by Tim Callan, Brian Nolan, John Walsh and Richard Nestor at an ESRI conference last month.
Whatever about the consultants, it's worth noting that RTE's News at One yesterday opened its account of a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General with welfare fraud amounting to £10 million. Written-off taxes amounting to £200 million didn't make the headlines.
The fact that one income tax settlement amounted to £6.6 million and one corporation tax settlement to £3.1 million didn't rate a line.