Our Euro-convergence knows no bounds. Stand aside Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and Spain. Courtesy of the disclosures of Frank Dunlop and others, we know we, too, have cultivated our own home-grown masters of tangentopoli, our own sleaze-merchants, even our own Helmut Kohl and Bettino Craxi rolled into one. Truly the island of saints and scholars has come of age.
Indeed a compare-and-contrast exercise between Dr Kohl and Mr Haughey is worthy of a political thesis. These two thick-skinned, Nixonian figures, reviled by the Dublin 4s of their respective countries but great long-term survivors, had an extraordinary common touch which mesmerised voters. And both - like Nixon in foreign policy - have left not insignificant marks at key moments in their country's history.
"You wait until you hear God's footsteps ringing through events," Dr Kohl said memorably at the time of unification, quoting Bismarck, "then leap forward and hold on to His coat-tails" Both were very good at leaping at the right moment.
And, critically, each ruled his party with an iron hand. Dissent was crushed and sycophants rewarded with a helping hand up the greasy pole.
In Dr Kohl's case, political control was made possible by his access both as party leader since 1982, and previously as chairman, to millions of pounds in illegal slush funds which were used to help the favoured ones contest elections.
In Mr Haughey's case, the mechanisms were more subtle. Ingredients of the party's traditional nationalism combined with the image of the successful rogue who played the clientelist game with great skill. And then there was fear and the colluding silence of the ambitious.
That old adage that "power tends to corrupt" is only half the story; a dangerous simplification which justifies both the unfair myth that "all politicians, ultimately, are the same" and the view that by reforming the system alone we can put temptation beyond reach.
Today debate in Ireland focuses on reform of the political funding system, yet both Germany and Italy have substantial state funding of political parties and, in the former case, radical disclosure laws.
German political parties receive generous public financing. Dr Kohl's party, the CDU, got about £36 million in 1998; the Social Democrats (SPD), the opposition at the time, got even more, about £45 million.
Even the former East German communists of the PDS were subsidised by the state to the tune of £6 million or so.
Parties can accept private donations if they fully disclose them; no anonymous donations greater than about £450 are permitted; and all donations of more than about £9,000 must include detailed information about the money's origin.
German parties are required to refuse donations that are "clearly" made on behalf of undisclosed third parties or "clearly" offered in expectation of a quid pro quo.
Yet none of this prevented massive cheating by one of the country's two leading political parties. And Germany is rife with rumours, as yet unproven, of similar violations by the SPD.
Italy's experience also suggests state funding is no panacea. Its ruling parties simply took bribes as well and bought their way back into office with wholescale patronage and cronyism.
And the state funding of the central apparatuses of the parties resulted both in massive centralisation of power within the parties in the hands of apparatchiks in Rome, and the parties' ability to survive without a mass membership base, suspended, as it were, above society. What has become known as partitocracia, the ultimate divorce of the party elites from society.
Ironically two years ago, precisely to remedy the latter defects, the Radicals proposed and successfully carried a referendum urging the abolition of state funding. MPs ignored the result and recently increased the aid.
What is clear from both Italy and Germany is that state funding and controls on financing of political parties, particularly the transparency of the system, may indeed make corruption more difficult but by no means stop it. Indeed, as one academic has warned, in a market situation, making bribery more difficult may simply put up the cost of bribing. Supply and demand.
Although a transparent system is certainly a necessary precondition for a clean-up, ultimately it is only the intolerance of voters to malpractice and their political will to make corrupt individuals and parties pay the ultimate electoral price that can definitively end such practices.
It is a price the CDU paid again in North Rhine-Westphalia over the weekend, and will go on paying until voters are convinced the party has changed.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
