Three years ago, Padraig Flynn sent out Valentine's Day cards with condoms inside them. He sent out lots of them - 300,000 in fact - to men and women all over Europe. He was not, of course, merely in an amorous mood. He was acting as EU Commissioner for Social Affairs and the man in charge of the Commission's Europe Against AIDS programme. The condoms and cards were part of a campaign called Play Safe in Europe.

It was a decent and proper gesture, but also an astonishing mark of how rapidly Ireland was changing. Even five years earlier, the notion of Pee Flynn from Mayo West urging Europeans to make love freely but carefully would have figured only in some far-out LSD-inspired hallucination.

Mr Flynn's penchant for white jackets, polka dot shirts, shiny ties and Brylcreem quiffs may have suggested, to an ignorant outsider, the fleshpots of swinging downtown Castlebar. But the visual impression was entirely at odds with the fierce social conservatism that he espoused.

In 1990, a little over five years before he emerged as the Play Safe Boy of the Western World, Pee had famously attacked the then presidential candidate Mary Robinson on RTE radio. One of the accusations in that celebrated diatribe was that Mrs Robinson was - horror of horrors - "pro-contraception".

Yet he managed to reconstruct himself. The basic instinct of a born politician like Padraig Flynn is to fit in with the prevailing mood. In Castlebar, he adopted the political and cultural colouring of the surrounding environment: clerical black and white. In Brussels, he blended in with the jazzy Euro background, Catholic crawthumper turned condom king. And he managed his transformation with real aplomb. He became a more convincing European social democrat than most European social democrats.

Which makes his tragi-comic turn on last week's Late Late Show all the more fascinating. For it was clear that even he, author of the most spectacularly successful reinvention in Irish public life this decade, had no idea how much Ireland had changed. Imagining himself at home, he relaxed into the old Fianna Fail style, not realising that what was, in the early 1990s, quite appealing is, in the late 1990s, quite appalling.

In a warm tribute to her former colleague, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn wrote in The Irish Times last October that Padraig Flynn is "a politician for whom Fianna Fail really meant something. He has lived, breathed and slept Fianna Fail his entire life. It is part of his genetic code, an instinctive reaction. It is a creed so deeply ingrained in him as to make religious fanatics look wishywashy." These days, however, genetic codes can be altered and religious fanaticism is out of fashion. Fianna Fail is greatly chastened. The revelation that there was a hard core of corruption right at the top of the party for many years has forced it to make new noises. The keynote, struck so finely by Bertie Ahern, is humility.

The self-righteous arrogance of the Spirit of the Nation is out. Any subject that might recall the holy wars of the 1980s - abortion in particular - is avoided. The notion of an almost unbroken apostolic succession of Fianna Fail governments, once so powerful in its appeal, has been ditched in favour of an aura of new-born innocence.

The recent past is discussed only when absolutely necessary and then with a shake of the head, a rueful sigh, a look of pained bemusement. Self-praise is out. The proper attitude is quiet, modest, conciliatory. Those who can't manage it are kept from view, which is why we so seldom see Brian Cowen on the box. Flashy images of conspicuous consumption are avoided. These changes are survival strategies. Bertie Ahern and his smarter colleagues know how different Ireland now is from the place they ruled in the Haughey years. They know that beneath the surface of contentment, there is an abiding anger. Poke the public at all - with, for example, the Haughey tax judgment - and the rage and disgust come pouring out. They are locked in a room with an unpredictable and potentially vicious beast and they have wisely decided to talk softly. Then poor Pee bounds into the room wearing a loud suit and a violent aura of self-satisfaction. Poor Pee has been away too long. He returns like Rip van Winkle to a changed world. But his genetic code is still intact. He walks into the Late Late Show studio, sees the familiar, eternal Uncle Gaybo, and thinks he is back on the ould sod.

He preens himself like a prize peacock. He complains about how hard it is to keep three houses - three houses! - going on a mere £140,000 a year. He recites, straight-faced and in blissful ignorance of the open-mouthed incredulity of the viewers, the sycophantic citation from an honorary degree awarded to him by an English university. He answers questions about an allegation that he received £50,000 from a property developer with the kind of carefully parsed language that would have done Charles Haughey proud. He makes snide and patronising comments about the man who made the allegation and his wife.

This made, of course, for riveting viewing. Ever since Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex a few thousand years ago, there has been great drama in the situation of a central character who is ignorant of some basic fact that the audience knows and who fires blindly onwards towards the doom that the audience can see ahead of him. Watching Peedipus smugly capering further and further into the mire had the same kind of horrible fascination.

And yet, it's hard to blame him. Until recently, that kind of performance won applause from the party faithful and grudging admiration from the infidels. Bluster and self-congratulation, smugness and pomposity, bravado and evasion were valued as traditional skills - the political equivalents of lovely hurling or nifty dancing. The big chief returning to his native haunts was expected to display the material fruits of his adventures. The natives were expected to be faithful and grateful to the man who winkled money out of Brussels on their behalf. Allegators were nothing but demented begrudgers.

If you're not around all the time, it's very easy to miss the kind of massive but subterranean shift in attitudes that has swept away all of these assumptions. Fianna Fail is back in power. The Late Late Show is still, for a while yet anyway, the Late Late. There is still a Flynn representing Mayo in the Dail. So how come, when you trot out the old plamas, you suddenly find that the plain people of Ireland are curling their toes in embarrassment and your own Fianna Fail, that you love with a more than religious zeal, is spinning stories against you in the next day's newspapers?

The answer - which Padraig Flynn probably realises by now - is that there's much more to the new mood in Ireland than condoms and valentines. Bertie Ahern knows it and he will sacrifice anyone who gets in the way of his frantic efforts to accommodate Fianna Fail to its vagaries.