Keep an eye on Marian Agrios’s tally when votes in the local elections are counted next week. For how many votes she gets – if any – may tell us how much, within the honesty box that is the ballot booth, Ireland really cares about integrity in its politicians.

Agrios will be the phantom candidate in the Drogheda Rural electoral area – on the ballot paper, but out of the race. She quit on Tuesday after the Ditch news website revealed she had agreed to desist from objecting to a residential development in return for a €15,000 cash payment plus €15,000 worth of work on her own home. For Fine Gael, which launched her candidacy with razzmatazz last month, Agrios is the incarnation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, haunted by her home.

The repercussions will spread far beyond Termonfeckin, where the six new houses were being built near Agrios’s house. Bad as the timing is – coinciding as it does with a Government planning Bill addressing what Simon Harris has called “spurious objections” – this scandal will amplify the mantra that Fine Gael has been in government too long.

Power may not always corrupt but it often attracts the wrong sort.

The free gratis enhancement of Agrios’s property revives another house doer-upper ghost from Fine Gael’s past. It is 28 years since it was revealed that the late businessman Ben Dunne funded IR£390,000 renovations to former government minister Michael Lowry’s house in Holy Cross, Co Tipperary. Lowry resigned from the cabinet. The Moriarty tribunal was established to, in part, investigate payments from Dunne to politicians. The inquiry took 13 years and cost €77 million. It concluded that Lowry’s........

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