A few months ago, on a flight from New York to Dublin, I happened to be in a seat next to Frank Dunlop. In the enforced intimacy of economy class, we naturally spent a few hours talking. Equally naturally, one of the topics was his pending appearance before the Flood tribunal. The only thing that belied the calm confidence of his convincing assertions that he had nothing to worry about was an air of injured innocence.

His demeanour was the same as it would be on the first day of his appearance before the Flood tribunal, before the dark night of the soul when he decided to come clean. He was no more than a lobbyist who had operated openly and was now being dragged into a scandal that was not of his making.

It may be that Frank Dunlop is a superb actor who missed his vocation. But it seems more likely that his denials were so confident and convincing because, at some level, he himself believed them. He is, after all, nobody's idea of a sleaze merchant. He's a nice, decent man, associated in the public mind with the nice, decent Fianna Fail of Jack Lynch, for whom he acted as press secretary.

If Frank Dunlop could act the innocent so well, it may be because he did not really feel guilty. What he had been doing when he was effectively buying the future of the capital city for a small group of developers did not seem wrong enough to keep him awake at night. And the same, presumably, goes for many of those who took money from him. While a few always saw public life as a route to personal riches, most probably started out as the kind of practical idealist to be found on the board of any residents' association or GAA club in the State.

It would, in a sense, be much less disturbing if Frank Dunlop reeked of the kind of lurid villainy that always marked Charles Haughey out from the ordinary flow of Irish life. To find out that a political mafioso has been acting like a godfather is not all that shocking. To discover that a nice, decent Irishman could live quite happily with his role as a conduit for the flow of sleaze into public institutions is quite another matter.

What Frank Dunlop has been telling us is that corruption is not a bizarre perversion of the norm, but a sophisticated system tightly woven into the fabric of public life. This is not to say that most Irish politicians are corrupt, or to forget that many brave and honourable elected representatives have fought against the tide of sleaze. Nor is it to fall back on the evasive "we are all guilty" hand-wringing that so often acts as a substitute for rigorous investigation and punishment.

A very specific and relatively small group of wealthy people is responsible for the graft that has poisoned Irish democracy.

But this system could not work without a much wider network of collusion and toleration. The scale of the operation to subvert Dublin County Council was such that it is simply no longer possible to believe that corruption was about a few bad people committing furtive crimes in dark corners. This was a network of knavery which stretched from the pinnacle of power occupied by Charles Haughey down to the small-time sleaze of local councillors whose votes could be bought for a few hundred pounds.

They operated within a wider culture in which thousands of small-time business people evaded DIRT tax with the collusion of the banks - a culture in which some members of the legal and accountancy professions were complicit in the Ansbacher scam. These solicitors and auditors, obviously, would have had to know at least in broad outline what their clients were up to. But they, too, were part of a culture that lacked any sense of outrage or guilt in the face of organised corruption.

And that culture included, crucially, the passive collusion of a wider public. As the recent experience of Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain makes clear, political corruption is not a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. What is peculiarly Irish is the degree of public tolerance for it.

The Italian Christian Democrats were literally destroyed by the Tangentopoli scandal. The German Christian Democrats suffered huge electoral losses in the wake of revelations about illegal party funding operations. The likes of Neil Hamilton were turfed out of parliament by the voters of middle England.

But however much Irish people may shake their heads and purport to be shocked, there is no evidence that the electorate here is unwilling to tolerate politicians who blur the line between public and private interests.

The good people of Tipperary North were not evidently troubled by the ethical problems of Michael Lowry, whom they reelected with a handsome vote. Nor can it be assumed that, if local elections were called next week, councillors known to have taken money from Frank Dunlop would suffer at the polls. The case of Colm McGrath certainly suggests otherwise.

Mr McGrath is the Fianna Fail councillor for west Dublin who actually proposed the most controversial rezoning, that of the Quarryvale site in 1991. It subsequently emerged that he had received £30,000 from the developers of the site, a revelation that embarrassed even Fianna Fail sufficiently for Mr McGrath to be de-selected as a candidate in last year's local elections. But he stood as an independent anyway and was comfortably re-elected.

What this suggests is that a significant part of the electorate has astonishingly low expectations of public life. A State that used to regard itself, however ludicrously, as a beacon of Christian civilisation seems unwilling to demand high standards of those it chooses to speak and act on its behalf.

If those involved in sleaze have shown a remarkable lack of guilt, their sense of having little to apologise for seems to reflect the attitudes of a large part of the citizenry.

How do we begin to explain this tolerance for dishonesty?

The easiest explanation, and one which will be attractive to many conservatives, is that public collusion with corruption is part of a wider moral decadence brought on by secular liberalism and the decline of religious belief. In this view, the loosening of ties between church and State in the 1980s and 1990s seems to coincide with the flagrant amorality of many in public life.

There is, however, one huge problem with this explanation. It seems extraordinarily naive to believe that political corruption is a specific phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s. The focus of the tribunals may be on that period, but some details point to much earlier origins for the culture of graft.

The relationship between Charles Haughey and his bagman Des Traynor goes back into the 1960s. The Ansbacher accounts were well established from at least the early 1970s. The High Court affidavit which gives us the fullest picture yet of the scheme reveals that it was "a senior member of the financial services community in Dublin" who came up with the refinement for using trusts in the Cayman Islands in 1983.

We know from this week's evidence at the Flood tribunal that by 1971 George Redmond had already accumulated around four times his annual salary from the generosity of his friends in the building industry. All of this was happening long before the decline in religious practice and the political influence of the Catholic Church.

And, although the public did not have the kind of specific detail that is now emerging, it was certainly not naive about what was going on. Fianna Fail's intimate relationship with builders like the Gallagher Group and developers like John Byrne was hardly a secret. Most people assumed that the planning process was corrupt and that high-level graft was a fact of life.

In Tom Murphy's great play The Gigli Concert, first staged at the Abbey in 1983, one of the central characters, a builder and developer, talks of "wheeling and dealing with that criminal band of would-be present-day little pygmy Napoleons we've got at the top". His housing estates, he says, were built out of "corruption, brutality, backhanding, fronthanding, backstabbing, lump labour and a bit of technology". No one at the time thought this character implausible.

If anything, tolerance for corruption was arguably higher in the 1960s and 1970s than it is now. It is easy to forget that the very existence of the tribunals that are uncovering the sordid realities of Irish political life is a mark of profound change. Until the early 1990s, corruption was so secure that it was virtually impossible to talk about it in public, let alone to investigate its details or hope to punish those involved. If the earlier era seems more innocent, that is only because it was better at covering things up.

The decline in religion, then, does not in itself explain anything. Nor does the collapse of the other ostensible source of public morality - traditional nationalism. The 1960s, the decade in which systematic corruption has its roots, was also a period in which nationalist rhetoric and emotions were at their height. But this new surge of apparent idealism did nothing whatsoever to infuse a new sense of moral purpose into the system or to make the public demand that its politicians live up to the self-sacrificing idealism of Connolly and Pearse.

What does begin to explain public tolerance of corruption, however, is something rather more subtle - the gap between the rhetoric of church and State on the one hand and the reality of Irish life on the other. The peculiar thing about the long period of transition from tradition to modernity in Ireland is not that the fusion of Catholicism and nationalism was gradually eroded but that it lingered so long as the governing ideology of the State.

Long after the Republic had become an urbanised State within the EU, with an economy fuelled by multinational investment, it retained, for public consumption, a rhetoric of spiritual and national purity that was utterly at odds with the way its citizens were actually living.

Living in the Republic meant having to get used to a kind of systematic hypocrisy, in which saying one thing and doing another was the definition of well-adjusted behaviour. The State was deeply religious, but tax evasion and the black economy were taken for granted. Catholics believed that artificial contraceptives were sinful but used them anyway. Bishops and priests who preached strict continence were having children of their own.

A constitutional amendment banning all abortion forever received the endorsement of a large majority of the electorate, but the Irish abortion rate remained typical of western Europe. Homosexual acts were punishable by life in prison but no one much minded that Dublin had a thriving gay scene. We all desperately wanted a United Ireland so long as we didn't have to have anything to do with the North. Unionists were Irish, whether they liked it or not, but at the same time they should go back to Britain.

Public morality, in other words, became hollowed out. Real ideals - ethics, public service, spiritual values, national pride, patriotism - operated in an area above and beyond real life. We got used to living in a society where fine words buttered no parsnips.

Since we knew that the people who sounded off most enthusiastically about morality and idealism were often the biggest scoundrels, morals and ideals were themselves degraded into little more than the empty rituals of public life.

Among those ideals, as we now know, was democracy itself.

fotoole@irish-times.ie