In the subtext of the continuing Ray Burke affair, as in all such controversies of recent years, is the idea of a culture which outrages us less on account of its objective immorality than the fact that most of us feel excluded from it.
The idea that money is swishing around the place while most of us are hard pressed to make ends meet creates an anger which, though expressed in moral terms, is rooted in envy. Behind this phenomenon is the shadow of the clientelist economy which we had been led to believe was a thing of the past.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I was a railway clerk in the west of Ireland, I first came in contact with the clientelist monster we have since heard so much about. I was at the time in charge of issuing school bus tickets, a matter for which there was an abundance of guidelines.
In theory, the system was absolute and incorruptible; in practice it had just the merest degree of flexibility. Whether you were entitled to a school bus ticket depended on how far you lived from the school. If you were less than the stipulated distance, you had to make your own arrangements; if you were more, you got a ticket.
In some cases it came down to a yard or two, which is where the limited element of flexibility entered the system. There was a bus inspector whose job was to go out and measure the precise distance. In borderline cases, where there was some extenuating circumstance, a word might be dropped in the appropriate ear, and a yard or two quietly added to the mileage.
Other than that, the system was foolproof and strokeproof. However, this did nothing to deter one particular TD from writing personal letters of solicitation to accompany virtually every second ticket application. Even though he must have known there was no point in his so doing, he was prepared to indulge the delusion of his constituents that a word from him could improve their chances of getting a bus ticket.
This TD is still going strong and has since become famous on account of a loudly-proclaimed antipathy towards the culture of clientelism which he perceives as being at the root of every evil. Over the years, I have listened to his fulminations with amusement.
I had a simple method of dealing with his representations - I placed the applications which had letters from him at the bottom of the pile, resolving to deal with them last. I would like to say that this was some form of calculated subversion against the endemic culture of clientelism but in truth I just didn't like him.
Before long, the area manager or some such luminary would slither into the office and casually ask if I had seen any letters around the place from Mr So'n'so. When I would innocently seek guidance on how we were supposed to deal with political interference, I would be told that, of course, the rules and procedures were inviolable but, of course, if we could see our way to, ah, you know, well, ah, ha, ha, ha.
Within hours, the bus inspector would come in and ask for a number of named files, the common factor being that they had been accompanied by a letter from our assiduous public representative. With borderline cases, he would do his voodoo, and the others would either be granted or rejected in the normal way.
The result was that a handful of families who might have otherwise had their applications rejected succeeded in getting tickets for their children. The same outcome might have been obtained in various other ways - for example by making representations to the bus inspector personally or, indeed, to me.
That is the way things used to work in this country. But not any more, or so we are led to believe. The culture of the stroke and the fix has been swept away - has it not? - by the waves of modernisation. I'm not sure about the school bus system but I know that those who believe the country is no longer like that are destined to walk wherever they go.
It has always been a confusing country for people who take things literally. If you were to listen to spokespersons for the Progressive Democrats, the Labour Party and Democratic Left, you would imagine that loyalty to their organisations would not entitle you to favours.
And yet, all of them have shown an exemplary capacity to leave the so-called "traditional" parties standing when it comes to fixing up their friends. Their rhetoric is one thing; their practice another. Moreover, their outrage at "the way things used to be" is carefully confined to their periods in opposition.
If you seek to draw attention to the "hypocrisy" which might suggest itself from this tendency, it is assumed that what you are objecting to is the fact that, now for a change, it is they who are divvying up the spoils of office among themselves. Their absolute incomprehension of the idea that there might be any kind of principle at stake suggests that when they, out of office, decried the abuses of their political opponents, what they were really expressing was their frustration that someone else had charge of the honeypot.
At all times, in or out of government, the response to revelations of abuse and corruption is predicated on how much political capital can be created from the episode - and on this alone. And we wonder why nothing changes.
BUT I AM interested neither in the possible universality of political corruption nor in the divergence between political rhetoric and behaviour for its own sake. What worries me is the confusion such double-dealing is likely to cause for those who are naive enough to take things at face value.
For in a culture in which nothing is what it seems, those who take things literally are doomed to lose out.
It is all very well not to believe in political influence and to vote for those parties which make opposition to clientelism an ethical virtue, but it is another when reticence causes you to miss out on something to which a little judicious interference, or at most a little dropsy, would have made you "entitled".
Because if everybody else knows how the system works and you alone are not in on the game, you're the one who's left on shank's mare.
We are, they say, at a point of transition from traditionalism to modernisation and it is inevitable that blips will occur. Weeding out the old culture takes time. But it is the consequences of transition which give most cause for concern - in particular the dualities of language and reality which create new forms of old conditions.
What if the old culture is not being weeded out but simply transmogrified? The result will be yet another process of two-tiering - this time between, on the one hand, those who have bought into the humbug and don't know why it is they are always losing out, and - on the other - those who know that the politicians who most loudly condemn the culture of clientelism are probably the best ones to approach when you need to get something done.