Tammany Hall is real spiritual home of Fianna Fail

The most important document for an understanding of politics in independent Ireland is not the 1916 Proclamation, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the 1937 Constitution or even the First Programme of Economic Expansion. It was not, in fact, even written in Ireland, and it appeared two decades before the Irish State was established. It is called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, and anyone who wants to understand Tribunal Ireland would do well to start within its covers.

The book is, as its subtitle A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics suggests, a verbatim record of the thoughts of George Washington Plunkitt, who is on no account to be confused with Joseph Mary Plunkett. This Plunkitt was the son of poor Irish emigrants to New York, who grew up in a shanty town in what is now Central Park in the 1840s and 1850s.

He spent a lifetime in politics as leader of the 15th Assembly District, Sachem of the Tammany Society, holder at one point of four different public offices (for three of which he was in receipt of a salary) and stalwart of the greatest of all Irish political machines.

When he died in 1924, after this lifelong political career, Plunkitt was, according to the New York Times obituary, worth "considerably more than $1,000,000", about £5 million today. If that doesn't remind you of anyone, you haven't been paying much attention to events in and around Dublin Castle over the last five years.

Instead of marching to Bodenstown every year, Fianna Fail ought to lay wreaths at the site of Tammany Hall. For the real inventors of the Irish political style are not Wolfe Tone or Charles Stewart Parnell but Boss Croker, "Honest" John Kelly and Charles Francis Murphy, who ran New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fianna Fail without the romantic rhetoric (which is to say, Fianna Fail after the 1930s) is Tammany Hall. People knew what they were doing when they called Charles Haughey "the Boss".

The Tammany men didn't have much time for flowery speech-making. The marvellous chronicler of Irish New York, Peter Quinn, tells the story of the taciturn Charles Francis Murphy, last of the great bosses. When his habit of keeping his mouth shut during the singing of the national anthem was remarked upon, one of his side-kicks explained that the Boss just didn't like to commit himself in public.

So Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, written down by the journalist William Riordon while Plunkitt held forth from his favourite rostrum, the shoeshine stand outside the New York County Courthouse, is the only real record we have of the political philosophy that has really animated this great nation of ours.

Plunkitt is fascinating on many subjects, but by far the most important of his talks for our purposes is one called "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft". If you can grasp this admittedly mind-boggling distinction, you are well on the way to knowing where Charles Haughey came from. If you can begin to see how Plunkitt could engage in blatant corruption and still declare that "the Irish was born to rule and they're the honestest people in the world", there is not much that any tribunal can tell you.

Plunkitt in the book makes no secret of the fact that he has lined his pockets with the profits of politics. But he considers himself an honest man: "I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft - blackmailin' gamblers, saloon keepers, disorderly people etc, and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics."

"Just let me", he says, "explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighbourhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before." Sound familiar?

To Plunkitt, this is all self-evidently reasonable. "Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? I seen my opportunity and I took it." He insists that because he had made his fortune merely by using inside information to anticipate the market, "I don't own a dishonest dollar".

Plunkitt is, in fact, genuinely horrified by politicians who actually steal public money. "The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With the opportunities all around for the man with a political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent."

Plunkitt also makes a general distinction between Irish graft and American graft. The Americans, he suggests, would take the roof off a poorhouse and sell it. But, he asks indignantly: "Show me the Irishman who would steal a roof off an almshouse! He don't exist. Of course, if an Irishman had the political pull and the roof was worn, he might get the city authorities to put on a new one and get the contract for it himself, and buy the old roof at a bargain, but that's honest graft. It's goin' about the thing like a gentleman, and there's more money in it than tearin' down an old roof and cartin' it to the junkman's, more money and no penal code."

Nor was Plunkitt coy about the ethics of party funding. To him, taking money from rich corporations is almost a religious duty. The party, he says, "does missionary work like a church and it's got big expenses and it's got to be supported by the faithful. If a corporation sends in a cheque to help the good work of the Tammany Society, why shouldn't we take it like other missionary societies? Of course, the day may come when we'll reject the money of the rich as tainted, but it hadn't come when I left Tammany Hall at 11.25 a.m. today."

If you cut away the rhetoric and make allowances for the effects of a changed political climate in which such direct speech has become impossible, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and Haughey of Abbeville are mirror images. In the wider culture from which Haughey sprang, there is the same rough and ready distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.

Putting tax revenues into your own bank account would be wrong. Using the knowledge gained from the privileged access of office to supplement your entrepreneurial "foresight" is just fine. And the whole operation is wrapped up in a sense of missionary zeal. Without money, there would be no good works and the heathens would be left in their benighted ignorance.

If Plunkitt's directness was still possible, the epitaph on that era of Irish politics would not be "I have done the State some service". It would be that suggested for himself by the Tammany man: "If my worst enemy was given the job of writin' my epitaph when I'm gone, he couldn't do more than write `George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities and He Took 'Em'. "