What sort of people are we? We know now. The findings of the latest Irish Times/TNSmrbi opinion poll show that two out of every three voters believe that Bertie Ahern was wrong to accept €50,000 from his friends while he was minister for finance in 1993. He was also wrong to accept £8,000 sterling from the Manchester function in 1994.
And yet, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has increased his satisfaction rating by one percentage point to 53 per cent, the highest of all party leaders. More dramatically, Fianna Fáil support has received a huge boost. It is up eight percentage points since the last Irish Times poll in May. Support for Fianna Fáil has reached its highest level - 39 per cent - since the last general election.
What a paradox! The electorate, it appears, after 10 years of tribunals into various forms of corrupt payments, can set up a glass wall between this Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil, to distinguish between £8K from friends as distinct from £8 million to his mentor, Charles Haughey.
The Fianna Fáil party will be astonished by the finding that Mr Ahern, acting solo on matters of personal and peculiar ethics, has given the party the lift which had evaded it in the last year or so. The party now has the highest rating since the general election result in 2002.
The new leader of the Progressive Democrats, Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, will also be vindicated by the findings. His personal rating is 32 per cent - one in three voters - compared to his predecessor, Mary Harney, who stood at 34 per cent in May. Almost half of voters - 47 per cent - believe that he took the right stance for his party in keeping Mr Ahern in office. It would be no surprise that 70 per cent of Fianna Fáil supporters endorsed his view but so did 64 per cent of his own party. And support for the PDs has increased by one percentage point to four per cent. The poll findings will be devastating for the proposed Fine Gael/Labour Party alternative coalition.
Faced with the most opportune circumstances in recent years, both parties experience a drop in support. Fine Gael support has dropped two percentage points while Labour has dropped dramatically by four points to 11 per cent. The core Fianna Fáil vote, after the extraordinary episodes of recent weeks, is 36 per cent. But the Fine Gael vote is 19 per cent and the Labour vote is only eight per cent.
This poll presents a snapshot of the state of the parties at a particular time but, given the events of recent weeks, it does much more than that. The culture of nods and winks and looking the other way is alive and well in Irish democracy. Among a significant sector, however, it reinforces the case that the public interest requires vigilance, investigation and continuing scrutiny.
If the rest of us "look the other way", it won't be long before the culture of corruption engendered by Mr Haughey will resurface. But, regrettably, this poll would indicate that this does not seem to matter.