Anyone else would be on a hospital trolley by now, begging to be put out of his misery. But months of domestic battering have not withered him nor customary, toe-curling, foreign media coverage staled his infinite variety.

Even as the great, panting media circus expressed thanks and admiration, not to mention surprise, to three sheepish-looking Commissioners for merely turning up at a press conference on Wednesday, a frighteningly ebullient Padraig Flynn was upstairs in an office bedecked with bunting, musicians, Guinness and smoked salmon, hosting the jolliest Paddy's Day party in town.

While members of his crestfallen cabinet hugged the walls, the sort-of resigned Commissioner gave a rousing rendition of The West's Awake, injecting some extra oomph into the line " . . . let England quake" for the benefit of Sir Leon Brittan, standing up front.

Our man was rockin'. Indeed, the Financial Times reported that he "harbours ambitions for reappointment in January".

Not for the first time, the question reared its head - how do they do it? Do they not bleed like us? As the high-gloss, high-speed Commission gravy train hit the buffers with an indignant screech this week, and MEPs - flushed with a new sense of importance - plotted further down-pegging for them, the 20 Commissioners cut a familiar posture.

Jacques Santer, damned to political perdition as the boss of an operation where it was next to impossible to find anyone with the remotest sense of responsibility, did his usual throwing-petrol-on-the-blaze trick. "This picture is distorted. I consider the tone of the report's conclusions to be wholly unjustified."

Edith Cresson, the French commissioner whose dentist/clairvoyant-turned-"scientific visitor", M Bertholet, pocketed £45,600 of public money a year in return for 24 pages of gibberish, blamed everyone but herself, refused to concede that she was anything more than "careless" and claimed that someone had tampered with the report.

And this, farcically, was after they had resigned.

Meanwhile, the once-sacred concept of collective responsibility flew out the window as the rest fought to maintain an exquisitely delicate balance; how to look righteously innocent, authoritative and humbly accountable all at the same time. But the latter is such an entirely new and astonishing challenge that for some of them, it was hopeless. They have no notion of the concept. How else could a woman like Cresson - who as a former French prime minister surely has the odd functioning brain cell - behave like a Marie Antoinette for the new millennium and not be even vaguely aware of it?

Some in Brussels seek to explain it by putting it down to the "cultures" of different states. It was remarkable for example that at a meeting of the European Liberal Democrats group - of which Pat Cox is president and sole Irish member - it was the Dutch, the Scandinavians and the British who were harshest in their criticisms of the Commission.

"I believe it is a difference in the concept of democratic accountability," says Bo Jensen, a Dane and secretary-general of the group. "For example, the French government can adopt an annual budget without the consent of the French Assembly - which surely suggests that democratic accountability in France is vastly different. And the more something is so, the more you get into that situation."

Different cultures, he reckons, divide the Anglo-Saxon north and the south: "Say you have a financial analysis on a transaction. The first thing an auditor from the south will do is look at the rules - what are they and has everything been done within them? If it's within the rules, then that is enough. But in the north, we would go on to ask further questions such as - is this also sound financial management?"

Mme Cresson's attitude was instructive in this regard. Summoned before MEPs to explain herself, her attitude, according to Pat Cox - who was a major catalyst in the move against the Commission - was one of utter incomprehension.

Where's the problem? Why not employ M Berthelot? Who else would you put in there - someone you don't know? Someone from Finland? He declared the contract, paid his taxes, didn't he . . . ?

Even as Cox was speaking, sleaze in French public life was leading French front pages again as President Chirac himself came under scrutiny in a tale of phantom jobs at the Paris town hall.

Cronyism and arrogant indifference to taxpayers' money were the familiar themes of a story that summoned up shades of the tight little band of Mitterrandistes in the early 1990s and their unquenchable belief in their own superiority even while being engulfed in sleaze. Both Cresson and Chirac are children of that culture, so thoroughly immersed in it that they never saw the writing on the wall.

Jacques Santer may conclude one day that it was all in the timing. A sense that that cliched trio of openness, transparency and accountability is now being infused throughout EU institutions courtesy of recent Scandinavian membership, as well as the fact that the so-called "lax" European states have their own hectic house-cleaning in progress all point to a new dispensation in which the Cressons will look increasingly anachronistic.

Spain, Italy, France and Ireland have all had their eruptions of sleaze and worse, followed by public exposure, tribunals and even criminal trials. Add to all that the increasing European Parliament frustration with being treated as the "junior partner" by an insufferably arrogant Commission (which also never lowered itself to read the writing on the wall), and it seems obvious that a sea-change has been in operation for a while.

What this week was all about, says Pat Cox, "was the great struggle to establish a minimum way of behaving which is appropriate to European affairs". The optimistic view is that soon there will be nowhere to hide.

It is a profound shift. Up to now, Commission-land has had a way of seducing even the most house-trained and transforming them into armour-plated little gods. One Scandinavian official tells the story of a senior politician from his country who after long service governing behind the proverbial pane of glass at home, eventually became a Commissioner. They met after a spell and the Commissioner - by now managing a budget twice the size of his home state's - was bubbling over with his good fortune.

"It's a fantastic change," he enthused. "At home in parliament, I was subject to scrutiny and heckling and hassling every single day. But since I became Commissioner, nobody asks me about anything I do . . . "

Different times.

For the European Parliament this weekend, it seems the era of being cast as self-regarding, ineffectual little johnny foreigners jabbing at abstract windmills is drawing to a close. The days when Santer could sweep in late to a Conference of Presidents (heads of political groups), a retinue of nine or 10 in his wake and everyone stopped breathing the better to hear the oracle, are finished.

Contrast this to the recent occasion when he was reduced to waiting outside a committee meeting for 45 minutes while lowly MEPs deliberated on the mandate for the so-called Wise Men inquiry, and later left without comment. The beast is tamed. Or so it seems.

MEPs are drunk with new-found possibilities this week. One suggested that the Commission's collapse "should be celebrated like Christmas". If that's the case, then a star on the tree is bound to reveal itself as Pat Cox, who came up with the notion that taking on the Commission was not about accountancy (Parliament had already questioned the Commission's accounts) but about the much broader issue of accountability.

It was he who took the decision to put two commissioners' names into the public arena to concentrate minds. He is unashamedly delighted with life.

"What happened was like giving a full forward a good pass with the prospect, if he held his cool, of burying the ball in the back of the net. What I felt this week was that sense of burying the ball in the back of the net," he explained cheerfully.

AND THIS WEEK, if the tussle for his attention was anything to go by, his status is assured. From his arrival in Brussels on Monday afternoon, his schedule was a headlong rush of 15-minute interviews with broadcasters and publications ranging from the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC in several manifestations, to local radio stations in Cork, Kerry and Waterford - all accomplished while chairing meetings and sounding out his group for a consensus on what comes next.

Conversations all over Brussels this week centred on what comes next, specifically how or when the Commission might be replaced. But purely in terms of self-preservation - not least because the European elections loom - MEPs are also more than a little wary of where the inevitable backlash is to come from.

They know the drill. Set yourselves up as accusers and guardians of Euro-ethics, and as night follows day, the next glare of the spotlight will be on you. At one level, the fracas can only be good. At another, it has drawn new and unwelcome attention to the gravy train, not least the telephone numbers being quoted as pay-offs for Commissioners found guilty of gross mismanagement at the very least.

Cresson, for example, is in line for a "transitional allowance" of over £62,000 a year for three years, plus a "family allowance" of around £6,000, plus - since she is 65 - an immediate drawdown of her pension, which will bring in another £28,000 a year for life. There is no question, according to her aides, that she will take the money due to her "under the rules".

Naturellement.

It's a short and edgy hop from that, however, to consideration of the MEPs' own lengthy catalogue of allowances and expenses and perks, including air fares (paid at the first-class/business rate), reimbursed now on production of a boarding card (not a ticket, note), and the exploitation of young assistants, often paid little to nothing despite a generous MEP allowance specifically for the purpose. But because some MEPs at least believe they have faced up to and grasped the nettle what will be exposed, says one official, may be just history. Proposals drawn up by Parliament itself and currently before the Council would regularise many of the most disturbing aspects.

In terms of public perception, however, there is a long road ahead.

Equally in terms of parliament's own record of parachutage (i.e. cronyism, patronage, etc.) the record is by no means clean.

Liberals and Greens have all drawn attention to the extraordinary situation by which a marine biologist, who happens to be the chef de cabinet of the parliament's Spanish president, was suddenly elevated above at least four superbly qualified candidates to become the parliament's director-general of finance and budgets.

One would-be president of the interim Commission touting his wares around Brussels this week was offering his services as "the toilet-bowl cleaner of Europe". This in effect is an offer to take on the highly comfortable staff unions, their demarcation lines and ultra-generous salaries within the Parliament, Council and Commission. Office secretaries, it is said, earn two to three times more than their counterparts working privately across the city.

Pat Cox claims that his car driver (a perk of being a group president) earns a higher salary than he does. The word is that Sir Leon Brittan could be the man for that job - if only because he confronted Arthur Scargill and the miners.

"Hmph," snorted one sceptic, "you could starve out the miners. You won't starve out that lot."

Citizens beware.