Soldiers of Destiny still marching to an old tune

Bertie Ahern prides himself on his political nous, his common touch. But one problem with keeping your ear to the ground is that you don't get a good view of the surrounding landscape. Stretched out in the snipegrass, you can't see the big picture. And in Irish politics, the big picture is no longer a serene scene. It is a Cubist portrait, all oblique angles and shifting perspectives. If you don't stand back, you can't make it out.

What we're seeing is the implosion of familiar Irish politics. The presidential contest, where party affiliations have become astonishingly loose, is one symptom. The most fascinating aspect of this week's MRBI poll for The Irish Times is the breakdown of party loyalties: only 51 per cent of Fianna Fail voters supporting the party candidate, half of Fine Gael voters supporting the party candidate and so on.

The rash of scandals and allegations is another. In two months, we have seen the reputations of two senior politicians, one a former Taoiseach, the other a former Minister, destroyed by the McCracken report. We have seen one former junior minister and deputy party leader questioned by the Garda in relation to money-laundering allegations. We are about to see another former senior politician charged with child abuse. And, of course, one of the most senior Cabinet members is fighting for his political life.

All of this was well under way by the time Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach last summer. It was by then predictable that the McCracken report would reveal that Charles Haughey, whose political protege Ahern had been, was operating under the personal motto "I have done the State. Some service!" And Ahern and his senior associates knew that Ray Burke had received a payment of £30,000 from two construction companies.

It was blindingly obvious in the context of the McCracken tribunal that this latter fact was enough to deprive Burke of the public confidence which a senior minister must have. Even if the transaction was innocent, that it took place at all was sufficient to prevent Mr Burke from functioning effectively in a crucial job. Public perceptions are not like legal judgments. However unfair it may be, a politician receiving such a huge sum from a person he does not know is assumed guilty until proven innocent.

Yet the Taoiseach, and much of his party were, for whatever reason, incapable of coming to terms with this reality. Immediately after the election, I referred here to "the return of the Living Dead", and suggested on Questions and Answers that it was a fatal mistake for Bertie Ahern to bring the likes of Ray Burke back into Cabinet. That article and that suggestion were described by Mary Hanafin, one of the bright stars of new Fianna Fail, as scurrilous and outrageous.

The party's attitude seemed to be that its return to power was the end of a harrowing journey. The 1990s so far had been a long series of disasters, a winding road from bad to worse, but now the party was back home, snuggled up in the nice warm bed of power, and all the nasty misadventures could be forgotten. And the PDs were there to tuck them in with a sweet lullaby: Liz O'Donnell told the nation that the events of the early 1990s were "ancient history". All that was needed was for Bertie to execute a neat side-step away from his past as Charles Haughey's sidekick, and all would be well.

This was an astonishing misjudgment for a party that had experienced, throughout the 1990s, the destructive power of unfinished business. If Bertie Ahern has learned one thing from his many years in Fianna Fail it ought to have been that you can't draw a line in shifting sands. When a political system is in flux, as ours is, one small movement can leave acres of old ground suddenly exposed.

It was pretty obvious what Bertie Ahern had to do. He had to drop the old stroke merchants, to bring in new faces, and, above all, confront openly his passive complicity with Charles Haughey's debasement of politics. Some attempt to acknowledge the scale of corruption, to explain his difficult situation in those years, to express what he had learned as a politician and a person from the exposure of his erstwhile Boss, would have gained him enormous credit.

But he lacked the necessary courage. He didn't have the guts to talk about Haughey except in abstract, coded terms. He didn't have the guts to tell Albert Reynolds that his political record made him unsuitable for the office of President. And he didn't have the guts to tell Ray Burke that simple old-fashioned patriotism dictated that the person negotiating the future of the island on behalf of the citizens of this State would have to have their trust.

That lack of courage - and not, I suspect, any lack of innate decency - has led Bertie Ahern back into the quagmire of evasions, strokes, desperate blathering and pathetic manoeuvres from which he wants to escape. Having bottled out of the task of creating new Fianna Fail, he remains the prisoner of the old, decrepit machine.

Instead of confronting the past, he has returned to it. His performance in the last week is vintage Haughey and Reynolds. Faced with a letter that suggests a person involved in the £30,000 donation believed planning permission could be "procured", the first instinct was denial. First, "a Government source" described the letter as a "normal business document, using standard business language", a formula of words that succeeded only in raising the question of what Bertie Ahern regards as "normal" and what his expectations of standard business practice might be. Then, the Government came up with terms of reference for an inquiry that were breathtaking not just in their absurdity but in the assumption of public naivety that lay behind them.

Did Bertie Ahern really believe he could solve the problem of public incredulity about Ray Burke's receipt of money from builders by setting up a tribunal to investigate everything to do with the lands in question except the fact that the senior politician in the area had received large amounts of money from the people who wanted to rezone them? Did he think that his own assurances that Ray Burke would be investigated would mean anything when the tribunal's powers ended up being debated in the High Court, as they inevitably would?

Anyone with experience of tribunals, like, for instance, the Attorney General, who served as counsel for the term of the beef tribunal, could have told him that his terms of reference were the script for a legal horror movie. He himself, as a member, with Ray Burke, of a Government which continually challenged the powers of the beef tribunal that it had established, must have known how little Government assurances mean when dangerous areas are being investigated.

And assuming that he did know all of this, then Bertie Ahern succeeded merely in demonstrating how far he is from moving his party away from the attitudes and practices that brought it so low. The Boss is dead, long live the Boss?