The boil has finally been lanced. What has emerged is very unpleasant, but a necessary preliminary to restoring the patient's health.
For a quarter of a century many honest politicians in all parties and political journalists have shared a moral certainty of widespread corruption in the Dublin planning process - and of financial misbehaviour among a few politicians at the top of our national political system. It has resulted in a shared sense of bitter frustration at the apparent impossibility of exposing these evils and eliminating them from our society.
Wednesday's events at the Flood tribunal, on top of earlier revelations from the Moriarty tribunal, have thus come as a relief to very many people. Relief, certainly, but not triumphalism. Few, if any, of those who sold their votes entered politics expecting financial gain through abuse of office. Good intentions somehow became dimmed and distorted as they allowed themselves to be tempted by corrupt businessmen.
Some of these politicians - particularly those who helped to organise the corruption, dragging weaker characters into the net - may face jail, but those who bought their votes will be due to do time with them. Their families will suffer most. There will lie some of the greatest tragedies of this sordid episode in our political history.
Corruption at local and national levels is in principle quite different.
Historically our national politics has been remarkably free of serious suspicions of financial scandal. The selfless patriotism and integrity of our revolutionary politicians, who, as leaders of Cumann na nGaedhal and Fianna Fail, in conjunction with the smaller Labour Party dominated the Irish political scene for the first four decades of independence, protected us up to the 1960s from any form of corruption at that level. When standards began to fall in Fianna Fail in the 1970s, its elder statesmen were deeply disturbed, as were many younger politicians in all parties.
But the history of democratic local government, dating from 1898, was very different. By 1922 many local authorities had become inefficient, and some were corrupt. Concerned about the payment of bribes to councillors by applicants for posts, the Cumann na nGaedhal government transferred decisions on local appointments to a newly-established Local Appointments Commission, suspended a number of councils and introduced county managers, who took over many powers that councillors had been abusing or misusing.
Fianna Fail was strongly critical of this policy, but when it came to power in 1932 de Valera's government found it necessary to continue suspending councils and kept the county manager system.
The whipping system at national parliamentary level carries little weight at local level, and councillors' links with the party they represent for election have often been fairly weak. The capacity of party leaderships to influence councillors' voting on local issues has been very limited. It is difficult for a party at national level to claim convincingly to know better than local representatives about local issues.
The wisdom of the 1963 decision to give councils extensive powers over land-zoning must be questioned, given the scale of the sums of money at stake in decisions on rezoning agricultural land.
Given the extreme difficulty of tracking down and exposing political corruption of this kind, there is a strong case for trying to reduce, or if possible eliminate, such sources of temptation to local politicians.
What about the political implications of all this?
In the 1991 Quarryvale vote, only 42 of the 78 councillors voted. While councillors who abstained might have received payment from Frank Dunlop for not opposing the proposal, it seems more likely that those who received payments are amongst the 29 who voted for this rezoning - 25 from Fianna Fail and four from Fine Gael. (Three of these 29 are in the present Dail).
Frank Dunlop made an exception for one payment of £500, so only 14 payments may have been linked to Quarryvale. But ignoring the "powerful individual" who received £40,000 for securing this job for Frank Dunlop, as well as later payments of £5,000 and £3,500, there were three other payments of £20,000, £15,000 and £12,000 respectively.
Now, while these may have been in respect of organising or whipping votes, some part of these larger amounts may have been passed on to others. More than 14 people may have received payments and so it seems likely that at least half of those who voted for the rezoning in 1991 received payments from Frank Dunlop, directly or indirectly. Most of those were Fianna Fail councillors, but they may have included one or more from Fine Gael.
We have yet to hear from Frank Dunlop about the 1992 council vote, when 37 councillors out of 69 voting rejected a motion to rezone the Quarryvale site for industrial development, and rejected a cap of 100,000 square feet on retail space and approved a cap of more than double that figure. Raising this cap again in 1998 involved a further £300,000.
Quarryvale is only one of a huge number of rezoning and material contravention decisions by Dublin County Council which have been regarded as bizarre or inexplicable in planning terms.
Radical reform of the local authority decision-making process, and of party fundraising and electoral expenditure, is needed. We have had half-measures only so far.
And, as part of any clean-up now to be undertaken, it would also be desirable to revert to the funding of elections exclusively by parties, but in future out of funds to be provided by the State. For the large-scale emergence (some 10 or 15 years ago) of personal campaigns financed for individual politicians opened the way for the abuse of elections by some politicians as a means of supplementing their personal incomes.
Finally, I am moved to wonder about the legal status of decisions taken as a result of bribery. In law, murderers cannot benefit from their crimes. Why should land-owners or developers be allowed to retain the profits arising from their crimes? If the law at present allows this to happen, should the law not be changed?