'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!" John O'Donoghue didn't actually recite those words of a harried Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo, but that was the theme and tone of Tuesday's valedictory Dail speech. There was no act of contrition as he told his critics it was they who'd got his spending out of all proportion, not him.

He lectured the slow learners: "While there may be a difference of scale with some in this House, there is no difference of principle between me and many others who are subject to these regimes."

As O'Donoghue bemoaned his subjection to outside forces, one newspaper editorialised: "It is not written in any manual, but there are certain things you don't do and don't allow."

The censure wasn't aimed at O'Donoghue. It appeared in France's Le Monde and was directed at President Nicolas Sarkozy whose 23-year-old son, Jean, is running to become head of a state agency with a €1bn development budget for France's financial district. One opponent complained: "It's a family affair and borders on nepotism. We are putting everything in the hands of the prince's son." Over 40,000 people signed an online petition demanding Jean's withdrawal.

Echoing a mantra of O'Donoghue's supporters, Sarkozy weighed in for his son, arguing: "It is never right when someone is thrown to the wolves without any reason." Responding to charges of nepotism in supporting his son's candidacy, the president shrugged: "Whatever I say, whatever I do, I will be criticised."

From an Irish perspective, the Sarkozy Jnr affair is a storm in a teacup. Here, it's considered natural that the three most senior cabinet posts, Taoiseach, Tanaiste and Finance, are occupied by deputies who inherited their seats from their fathers. In O'Donoghue's Kerry South constituency this week supporters reminisced about how his councillor mother had built an electoral power base for her son.

But the father and son furore is the least of the scandals afflicting France, and some establishment responses suggest that our political caste are not the only ones in need of a reality check.

Sarkozy's government is still smarting from the flak drawn by Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand's call for the release of director Roman Polanski, jailed in Switzerland in connection with an underage sex conviction. Sarkozy promoted Mitterrand to cabinet knowing that he had published a book on sex tourism in which he wrote: "I got into the habit of paying for boys ... the slave market excited me enormously." Sarkozy has described the book as "courageous". Speaking for the president, a colleague dismissed calls for Mitterrand's resignation as "pathetic".

Meanwhile, Sarkozy's bitter rival and France's former PM, Dominique de Villepin, is standing trial on multiple charges of "complicity in calumny, complicity in the use of forgeries, dealing in stolen property and breach of trust". The key charge is that Villepin forged documents to frame Sarkozy for criminal activity as both fought for the presidency.

If France's politicians are up to their ankles in sleaze, there's enough oozing around Silvio Berlusconi for the Italian PM to perform a triple somersault from the high board. One of the media baron's first acquisitions was the TV station Canal 5, which he turned into a campaigning force exposing corruption in Italy's old regime. Today he controls most of Italy's media, and its chief interest in sleaze is to bury it, because most seems to involve Berlusconi.

After openly criticising Berlusconi's selection of sexy young females to stand in June's Euro elections, and questioning his relationship with an 18-year-old who called him "daddy", the PM's wife filed for divorce last May. In June a female escort claimed Berlusconi had paid her for sex. Last week, Italy's supreme court threw out a law passed by the PM granting him immunity from prosecution on bribery charges. This week he whinged: "I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind." However, he's staying put.

Spain, meanwhile, is in the grip of "eco-corruption" scandals. Officials in the town of La Muela have been arrested, charged with demanding backhanders to allow the building of wind farms. Townsfolk were allegedly sent on holidays to Brazil, Mexico and the Caribbean as bribes for their complicity. Elsewhere, officials have been sacked and arrested for giving licences for setting up solar-power gardens to relatives, and selling them under the counter to cowboy operators. When inspectors checked 30 solar gardens, only 13 were genuine.

What France, Italy, and Spain have in common is that historically they're Catholic. A 1996 study called the Corruption Perception Index pointed out that, traditionally, southern Catholic countries tended to rate as more corrupt than northern Protestant ones. That study ranked Spain and Italy as "quite corrupt", while Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Britain were "least corrupt". Catholic but northern, Ireland was ranked close to the "least corrupt" group.

But what of Britain's "least corrupt" standing now? This week PM Gordon Brown was asked to return £12,000 for excessive cleaning, decorating and gardening claims. Others embarrassed following an expenses audit include Chancellor Alistair Darling, who'd misclaimed for furniture, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (overenthusiastic gardening), and Tory PM-in-waiting David Cameron who'd received undue expenses due to "an inadvertent administrative error".

On Thursday, it emerged that Tory MP David Wiltshire charged £105,000 of taxpayers' money for "office assistance" to a company wholly owned by himself and his partner Ann. Faced with the unpalatable facts, the reaction of many MPs hasn't been to come out with their hands up, but to gripe that the audit is unfair.

Britain's expenses scandal is the latest in a long line since Labour came to power in 1997 with Tony Blair pledging to mop up "Tory sleaze" by being "purer than pure". Two years ago Blair became the first serving PM questioned by police when it emerged that Labour had been using a loophole in the law to effectively sell knighthoods.

There have been other signs that in this secular age the old Catholic/Protestant sleaze divide is redundant. Protestant Latvia is a basket case, with two of its main parties led by disgraced politicians. A recent PM had difficulty explaining away a briefcase full of banknotes in his possession. In Germany, home of the Reformation, Chancellor Helmut Kohl admitted running a party slush fund. Prosecutors alleged the money came as bribes from a firm seeking a licence to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. Kohl said: "Running accounts separately from the normal accounts seemed appropriate." A colleague who had a bank account created for him by a third party, said he'd never investigated it because it was "uninteresting".

Protestant transparency is so ingrained in the Dutch, that many homes have no curtains so passers-by can see that householders are behaving themselves. When army chief Prince Bernhard was caught taking a million dollar bribe to approve a jet fighter purchase, he responded: "I am above such things." The parliament voted not to prosecute.

Studies have concluded that a distinctive influence on Irish politics is its "localism", meaning that the distance from the clientelism of the parish pump to the Dail chamber is less than a stone's throw. Around 85pc of TDs are infected with localism because they start out as councillors. Garret FitzGerald observed that localism is "a very powerful distorting factor in the Irish political system".

Reacting to John O'Donoghue's parting speech in which he insisted he'd be vindicated by his constituents, Mary O'Rourke TD said approvingly: "He gave a rallying cry to Kerry."

We may be turning into a nation of lapsed Catholics, but ingrained localism means there's a widespread tolerance of post-Catholic lapses. What would be welcome from our political masters is some old-fashioned Catholic guilt.

Irish Independent