Many people -- poor dolts -- are a) surprised; b) disappointed; and c) angered by the emerging details of the National Asset Management Agency.

But no sensible person should be either surprised or disappointed by anything that Fianna Fail does: though, of course, they should be angered.

I certainly am -- for age has not yet supervened to close down the final corner of this particular emotional trinity.

So, here we go again. The honest folk of NAMA are, in effect, being assembled to rescue our rapacious developer-class, the shady ruffians who were such generous contributors to Fianna Fail over the years. And naturally. For modern Ireland is the diseased polity that Sean Lemass created out of de Valera's failed state. He conjured a new speculator class into existence, on the quid pro quo that it would then subsidise his party, as meanwhile the state protected it.

All governments -- even non-Fianna Fail ones -- henceforth would feel obliged to safeguard the assets and the activities of those who gambled in the futures market of this Lemassian state of ours.

The terms of this contract are steeped in the mysterious culture of Fianna Fail, which morally has more in common with Sicily than with Rome.

This allows its members unblinkingly to digest, whole and unchewed, all the contradictions that constitute the party's history: the Rising, the War of Independence, the rejection of the Oath, the Civil War, the formation of Fianna Fail, the acceptance of the Oath and the transition into government, the Economic War, the executions of some IRA men, and the hunger-strike deaths of others, the collapse of the State in the 1950s, the new State built on the ruins of the old one, the emergence of the mohair brigade and TACA, and the foundation by senior members of Fianna Fail of the Provisional IRA.

Indeed, Fianna Fail so little abhorred the foundation of the Provisionals that it made the chief party conspirator, Charles Haughey, its leader. And though he nearly ruined the state, he personally lived like a Florentine prince. How? By the generosity of the very speculator-class that today NAMA is intended to rescue.

Now forgive me, while I reach for my old familiar drum again. If you know anything about the 1916 Rising, and all that followed, and if you find those events a matter of pride, then your rulebook is clearly exceptionalist, proclaiming that the 10 commandments don't always apply to you. So you cannot be surprised if others make their own, but different exemptions, from those commandments.

Exceptionalism to the rulebook is indeed the great defining moral norm of Irish life, the IT-factor. IT creates a culture of tolerance of everything, from murder, theft, ineptitude, low public standards, personal unpunctuality and even double-parking. IT -- in its various forms -- is everywhere. IT allowed Dan Breen to be hailed a hero for murdering two harmless policemen. IT allowed Eamon de Valera to embezzle vast fortunes raised in the US for "Ireland". IT allowed the Cumann na nGael McGraths simultaneously to steal millions from the Irish Hospitals Trust.

More recently, IT allowed gardai in Donegal to systematically corrupt the rule of law. IT allowed Beverley Flynn TD to commit perjury. IT allowed Bertie Ahern, while Taoiseach, to publicly deceive a sworn tribunal. IT allowed Sean Fitzpatrick to play ducks and drakes with tens of millions in his bank. IT allowed the government regulator Patrick Neary to be given a tax-free gratuity and a pension worth zillions, after he failed to report what Fitzpatrick was up to.

IT allowed John O'Donoghue, quite legally, to squander at least €32,500 of taxpayers' money over five days, as he swanned around in the government jet to golf-rugby-film junkets across Europe. And of course, IT was personified in all its forms by Charles Haughey.

Now fill in all the other IT blanks yourself.

This is the great insoluble contradiction of the Irish Republic, for which the genome of our history allows no resolution.

You cannot both laud and then proceed to build a genuinely moral state upon the events of Easter 1916. It is not possible. For any ambiguity about violence towards our fellow Irishmen undoes any abiding, all-encompassing moral order, and in the absence of such a compelling ethical matrix, to each his own.

So, what is worse: on the one hand, the pathological immorality which is now apparently an ineradicable characteristic of this country -- its politicians, its bankers, its builders and its double-parkers; or on the other, the Republic's birth, from the murder of unarmed civilians and police officers on Easter 1916, to the execution of 77 anti-Treaty prisoners in 1923?

Which is worse?

But me no buts about the Famine, the Black and Tans, Bowen-Colthurst or the Larne gun-running.

WHICH IS WORSE?

- KEVIN MYERS