Despite the flow of news from Ireland's tribunals, international perceptions of the degree of corruption in the State's public services remain substantially unaffected.
The publication yesterday by the anti-corruption campaign, Transparency International (TI), of its annual "corruption perception index" shows Ireland's global ranking change only very slightly, from 19th to 18th in the cleanliness league, and its score improving by a statistically insignificant amount.
The survey, a poll of polls, samples business, academic and popular opinion about perceptions of corruption, ranked from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt), and places Finland again at the top of the league with the near-perfect 9.9, while Bangladesh languishes at the bottom with 0.4.
Ireland scores 7.5, up from 7.2 last year.
Of the EU states, Denmark (2nd with 9.5), Sweden (6th), Netherlands (8th), Luxembourg (9th) and the UK (13th) have scores above eight, while Italy (29th at 5.5) and Greece (42nd at 4.2) perform least well.
Germany, in the wake of revelations about the fund-raising activities of the former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, saw its ranking fall from 14th in 1999 to 20th this year. In a previous, separate, study of perceptions of which countries' businesses were most likely to offer bribes, Sweden topped the cleanliness league, an exercise TI intends to repeat shortly.
Most alarming from an EU perspective is the persistence of perceived corruption in the accession states, none of which score more than five, and only four of which score better than Greece (Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania). Of those hoping to be in the first wave of accession, Poland is 44th in the league with a score of 4.1, while the Czech and Slovak Republics and Latvia do worse still. (Cyprus and Malta are not included in the survey because of lack of statistical data).
The US is ranked 16th, China 57th and Russia 79th.
Presenting the results in Washington, TI's vice-chairman, Mr Frank Vogl, said the group believed the survey's annual publication was having a significant effect in stimulating discussion and political pressure in many of the 91 countries surveyed.
The reality that two-thirds of countries had scores less than five highlighted what he called a "crisis of governance" and he called on governments to step up their implementation of OECD-stimulated anti-bribery legislation.
Specifically, Mr Vogl warned that the world had to recognise the link between tackling the AIDS crisis and tackling the corruption that saw many medical resources stolen or the poor forced to pay bribes for access to treatment.
Asked why the survey failed to reflect more sharply specific countries' episodic corruption scandals, Mr Vogl said the poll was based on figures aggregated over three years to eliminate such distortions.
Such a practice might have the effect in Ireland's case of understating current concerns, he said, while in respect of Nigeria (90th at 1.0) where President Obasanjo is waging a determined campaign against corruption, the effect would be to understate improvements.
