There is now, among most of the political establishment, a consensus that low standards are a thing of the past, writes Fintan O'Toole.
There was an unfortunate period, back in the 1980s, when some people at the top were blatantly on the take.
But the tribunals have uncovered the truth. The guilty have been named and shamed. A line has been drawn in the sand.
Thus the almost hysterical reaction to the announcement last week of the foundation of the Centre for Public Inquiry, a private body, funded largely by the Irish-American philanthropist Chuck Feeney. In the Seanad, PD senator John Minihan fumed that "this is a serious and worrying development. I urge all those who support the institutions of the State to examine the establishment of this centre." He received support from both Fianna Fáil's Mary O'Rourke and Fine Gael's Brian Hayes.
The general thrust of the argument seems to be that there is no longer a problem and, if there is, it will be dealt with by the official structures of investigations and tribunals.
This seems to me to ignore two of the most obvious things we have learned from the tortuous process of revelation over the past 15 years. One is that there is a huge time gap between the occurrence of a questionable act and its exposure. The other is that even the tribunals, with all their powers, are still limited by the general assumptions they make. It is simply not the case that the public can have confidence that a tribunal will reveal the full story.
The PDs should be especially aware of this because the inquiry they did most to create - the beef tribunal of 1991 to 1994 - can now be seen as having missed so many crucial pieces of evidence that it now looks like an exercise in wilful naivety.
This was not all that obvious at the time. The inquiry uncovered so much malpractice - fraud, theft, tax evasion and gross irresponsibility with public money - that it seemed to have opened a full can of worms.
Yet, in the decade since it reported, revelations have dribbled out from other inquiries that have changed the entire picture. The inquiry was established in the first place because of allegations by the PDs, Labour and the Workers Party that Charles Haughey's government was excessively close to the beef empire of Larry Goodman. Three years of hearings failed to corroborate these charges.
Yet we have since learned a number of things that, if they had been revealed at the time, would have made the whole issue of potential conflict of interest far more concrete. Here are a few of them:
1. Charles Haughey had direct and bizarre links with the bank that handled the transactions at the core of the beef tribunal - the sale, underwritten by taxpayers' money in the form of export credit insurance, of vast amounts of beef to Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. In October 1979, Haughey told Allied Irish Banks that he could secure a £10 million deposit from the Iraqi Rafidain bank, which was controlled by Saddam and his henchmen.
2. A £50,000 payment from Larry Goodman to Fianna Fáil in 1989 was treated by the tribunal as a "normal" political donation of which Haughey would have been unaware. In fact, the source of this cheque was recorded by Fianna Fáil as "anonymous".
This meant, as the former party financial controller Seán Fleming has since explained, that Charles Haughey had given specific orders as to how it was to be handled - "the word anonymous was used at the direction of the Taoiseach (Mr Haughey)".
3. Another payment - of £25,000 - from Larry Goodman to Fianna Fáil around the same time was not disclosed by either party to the beef tribunal. It emerged at the Moriarty tribunal, where it was described as a contribution from Larry Goodman to Brian Lenihan's medical expenses. But the cheque was made out to "Fianna Fáil (Party Leadership Fund)" and seems not to have been used for Mr Lenihan's benefit.
4. Larry Goodman advanced about £600,000 to the then-influential Fianna Fáil politician Liam Lawlor and his companies in the late 1980s, of which only £350,000 was subsequently repaid. These transactions, which related to the purchase of lands in west Dublin, went through offshore companies.
5. In spite of denials at the time, the Goodman group had control of the Master Meats group of companies that were largely ignored by the beef tribunal. The "immediate holding company" of Master Meats was Hentex Limited, all of whose assets are in turn listed as being in the beneficial ownership of the Goodman company Anglo-Irish Beef Processors.
The failure to uncover these facts, any one of which would have had had an explosive effect in the early 1990s, is a salutary warning against smugness now. If the beef tribunal missed so much, what are the other tribunals missing?
The assumption that everyone else should stop digging just because a tribunal is on the case is at best naïve. If you draw a line in shifting sands, it will soon be covered up.