Last May, shortly after P.J. Mara had run another successful general election campaign for Fianna Fáil, Vincent Browne interviewed him for The Irish Times. He asked the party's director of elections about Charles Haughey, writes Fintan O'Toole.
P.J. Mara was full of praise for the old crook. He still saw him, was still his friend. He was still proud to be associated with Haughey in the public mind: "When time elapses and when the balance sheet is totted up, the pluses and minuses, when his legislative achievements are placed in the balance against other matters, I think that his record will stand the test of time."
I love that "other matters", and I will return to it.
Vincent Browne went on, however, to ask P.J. Mara about another old friend, Ray Burke: "I certainly would regard him as a friend of mine. We had fun times together and again, as I said, I am not in the habit of abandoning my friends."
At the time, P.J. Mara knew, as everyone does, that both Haughey and Burke had prostituted the State offices they had held to the interests of a small clique of wealthy individuals. He knew, as a professional public relations man, that it was not good for his party's image to remind the public of the ties of friendship and allegiance that bind Bertie Ahern's Fianna Fáil to Haughey's.
But, what the hell. Victory had been secured. Power would remain in the right hands for another five years. There was room for a touch of honesty, a glimpse of the real core value of Fianna Fáil. We are not in the habit of abandoning our friends, even if they have committed the ultimate sin of getting caught up to their elbows in "other matters".
It is that very quality, of course, which has made the party so attractive to those who see nothing wrong with oiling the machinery of State with the magical lubricant of bribery. If you're going to buy influence, you want it to be with people who are not in the habit of abandoning their friends.
The converse is also true. If they do abandon their friends when "other matters" crawl out from under the stone, they are barely worth bribing in the first place. In this world, the proffered currency may be dollars, pounds or euros, but loyalty is legal tender too.
In this sense, a corrupt system has two necessary parts. There are the crooks such as Haughey and Burke, who trade access to power for large sums of money. And there are, no less importantly, the loyalists, the people who are not themselves corrupt but who enable corruption by keeping alive the core value of not abandoning your friends.
The great torch-bearer for this core value is Bertie Ahern. He has shown time and again that he will not abandon his friends. He will sign blank cheques and never ask what they are being used for. He will try his very best not to know facts that would embarrass his friends. He will sit on information when he gets it. He will acknowledge those facts only when someone else makes them public. He will defend his friends until they become indefensible.
Nothing will ever change this. We know this because even the Flood tribunal has made no difference at all to the Taoiseach's code of loyalty. Even over the weekend he made it clear that the loyalty P.J. Mara has shown to Haughey and Burke will now be extended to Mara himself.
The Taoiseach claimed that the Flood report finds Mara "innocent". In Bertie Ahern's mind, therefore, the concept of innocence covers all of the following: setting up two offshore bank accounts on the Isle of Man; lodging to those accounts large sums that had not been declared to the tax authorities (we know of at least two lodgements, one for £20,000 sterling and another for $20,000); ensuring that the records of the company that held these accounts at the Companies Office would not disclose his beneficial ownership of the money; and failing in two separate sworn affidavits and in other correspondence to reveal the existence of these accounts, even though he was legally obliged to do so.
In evidence Mr Mara told the tribunal that he had "bad thoughts" about the money in these accounts, and subsequently brought it back to Ireland and declared it. It is clear from the report, however, that he was still sending money to this secret offshore account as late as September, 1997.
Bertie Ahern knows, therefore, that the man who ran the campaign that made him Taoiseach in 1997 was at that time the holder of an elaborately constructed secret offshore account.
Yet he regards this fact as so immaterial that it does not in any way impugn his friend's innocence. Indeed, he told Ireland on Sunday that he hopes P.J. Mara "will work again with us in the future".
This is a stark expression of the mentality that has led Fianna Fáil into the mire. Loyalty is the prime virtue. Small details such as the holding of offshore accounts and the deliberate misleading of a tribunal established by both houses of the Oireachtas are just "other matters". And other matters, as the Taoiseach's behaviour has told us again and again, don't really matter.