Watching the scintillating American drama series The Wireover the Christmas break, I heard a phrase I thought was peculiar to Irish politics. Royce, the corrupt mayor of Baltimore, where the series is set, runs a rigged poker game at which his friends can conveniently lose large sums to him, allowing them to make donations that stay off the books. Royce calls this cash "walk-around money", writes Fintan O'Toole.
If this rings a bell, it is because it very nearly chimes with a phrase that Ray Burke used at the planning tribunal in 2001 when he was asked to explain why so many cheques drawn on his bank account were made out to cash. Burke described this cash as "walking around money".
Burke's phrase opened a little window into the culture of cash in Irish politics and especially in Fianna Fáil. That virtually the same phrase is used in the US suggests that the concept itself is rooted in the 19th-century Irish machine politics that spanned the Atlantic. It relates to another phrase that links Fianna Fáil and the old Democratic Party machines of American cities - The Boss.
The Boss attracted money from supporters, sycophants and business people who needed a friend in office. He threw some of it around to the little people in the form of drinks, conspicuous acts of charity, a few coins for the kids. Walking-around money was the glue that held together a system of mutual benefit and obligation.
One of the things we now know about Bertie Ahern is that he was obsessed with cash. Though he didn't, so far as we know, follow his mentor Charles Haughey or his pal Ray Burke in the habit of throwing a little cash around among the little people, he took it when he could get it. And Bertie, it will be recalled, is the same man who boasted last year of appointing friends to State boards.
One of the things we can now look at in a clearer light, for example, is the strange episode of the Philip Sheedy case.
In October 1997, Philip Sheedy was jailed for four years for killing, while he was driving drunk, Anne Ryan, a Tallaght mother of two young children. Sheedy spent six months in Mountjoy and was then transferred to Shelton Abbey.
On October 14th, 1998, Joe Burke, a long-time associate of Bertie Ahern and one of the contributors to the infamous dig-out, visited Sheedy in Shelton Abbey. Some weeks later, Sheedy's case was re-listed and he was released from prison.
Both Supreme Court judge Hugh O'Flaherty and the judge who released Philip Sheedy, Cyril Kelly, resigned as a result of the scandal that blew up when these facts emerged subsequently.
Philip Sheedy had worked for Joe Burke's pub refurbishment business. Though we were told that Joe Burke never discussed the case with Bertie Ahern, in July 1998 the Taoiseach, by an extraordinary coincidence, asked the then minister for justice, whether it would be possible for Philip Sheedy to get day release. The Taoiseach's inquiry was recorded in a written note by his secretary simply as "Justice - what's the story?"
And that was the question that was never satisfactorily answered. The Taoiseach assured us all that it was "nonsense to suggest that the Government showed any special sympathy to Mr Sheedy . . . I applied no political pressure to get Mr Sheedy early release".
That may well be true, and there is no evidence to the contrary. What there was, however, was an extraordinary set of interventions at the highest level to have a criminal released from prison, and a very peculiar reluctance on Bertie Ahern's part to disclose the fact that he had made representations on Philip Sheedy's behalf.
When the controversy broke, and he was reminded of his actions by his private secretary, he told the cabinet and undertook to reveal the information to the Dáil. But he didn't do so and the information was revealed instead by the Sunday Tribune.
It is interesting, in hindsight, to recall Bertie Ahern's excuse for his reluctance to reveal his role in the affair. It arose, he said, from a "legitimate concern not to feed conspiracy theories, or by juxtaposing irrelevant information to imply or signal the probability of some hidden connection".
And this, surely, is precisely the reason why he should never have taken money from private individuals like Joe Burke in the first place. The probability of some hidden connection is always on the minds of Irish people, partly because we know from bitter experience that they may exist and partly because it is a small country with a love of gossip.
When money is changing hands, conspiracy theories become all too credible, even when they're dead wrong. A coincidence of the kind that happened, on the Taoiseach's account, in the Sheedy case, starts to smell very fishy.
You can't run a country on those assumptions and this one shouldn't be run by someone who has done so much to feed them.