So I'm sitting on the plane heading for my holiday resort, and that old feeling comes o'er me stealing. That old feeling that someone nearby is barely holding back from holding me personally responsible for something done by some member of Fianna Fail. When people stop holding themselves back, they're usually very polite about it.
"I know you're out of politics," they say. "But . . "
Then comes the accusation, arm-in-arm with the expectation that I will die to defend the person they name. Half the time they're accusing someone I could never stand and I'm dying to agree with them. Not this time, though.
"I know you're out of politics," my fellow passenger, who looked to be in her 70s, said. "But I hope that Jim McDaid is not a friend of yours."
I had to confess and apologise straight away. That Jim McDaid is a great friend of mine. Sorry. She looked at me as if I had confessed to being Pol Pot's best buddy. What on earth, I asked, had Dr McDaid done to her? The answer was he had uprooted the new Bord Failte logo for Ireland.
Up to then she thought he was fine, but to take away the logo made her reassess him.
"He's going to reinstate the shamrock, as I understand it," I said. "That's what I'm talking about," she said, now (rightly) furious with me for typecasting her, assuming that because she was older she would be fighting for the traditional logo. "That little drawing was wonderful. It was full of warmth and life and welcome.
"It was all about craic and divilment and divarshun - isn't that what Ireland is supposed to be all about, these days? Putting back up that old sign like the country was a convent. He's young enough to know better, and you can tell him that from me."
It was just the latest in reactions I've heard to the Minister replanting the old shamrock instead of the more impressionistic birds-eye-view emblem of two people embracing. Or dancing. Or swapping little shamrocks. Or whatever they were doing.
At one end of the scale is my fellow-passenger, livid at what she sees as a retrograde step. At the other are the people who felt, but lacked the courage to say, "I don't know much about logos, but I know what I like." The logos these people like are logos that explain themselves at a glance: harps say Guinness or Leinster House (depending on colour and personal preference), golden arches say McDonald's.
The logos they do not like are logos which can't be understood until you have listened to a lecture on their background rationale. If you take up a copy of the IPA diary and leaf through it, you will find countless logos which have undoubtedly been developed through a lengthy, thoughtful and creative process, and which (a) are not immediately identifiable if the company name is not printed beside the icon, and (b) do not instantly crystallise precisely what it is the company is offering.
As Opposition spokeswoman on health, I became particularly aware of the spirited squiggle that features on the letter-head of that Department. It did not evoke any immediate health connotations for me. Maybe it's S for slainte, I would occasionally think, and then decided the Department would not have gone to such trouble to obscure such an obvious intention.
It probably, I would then think, was supposed to suggest a spermatozoa, indicating the Department's pre-cradle-to-grave concern. Or perhaps a discus-thrower coming out of that twirl they do before throwing the discus. Or maybe it represents an eraser rubbing out bad health.
No doubt both the Department and the designers involved would tell me that by forcing me to speculate they involved me with the Department in a deeper relationship than would have been achieved by a boring old traditional, representational logo.
However, being forced to try to work out what on earth a logo is supposed to signify is not actually a good way to create warm feelings towards the logo-owners.
Logos and branding have almost become a religion. They convey a sense of belonging to the aficionado who spots the emblem.
I remember standing in a small shop in Spain a few years ago when an Irish family discovered that it sold Jacobs cream crackers. They gathered around the display of packets almost reverently. It turned out that they didn't want cream crackers and didn't eat them at home, but the Jacobs logo, out there in Marbella, spoke to them of things Irish with a resonance understood only by the clan whose exile takes the form of an annual fortnight.
In our mental maps, logos can become fixed reference points, and as a result, reassuring. So when Aer Lingus italicised its shamrock, it upset people who were used to the shamrock standing up straight on the tails of planes. (I had no particular problem with the shamrock listing, though the cost of the change made me wonder why it hadn't keeled over in a dead faint).
When Bord Failte abandoned the shamrock, resistance to the change was inevitable. Some saw the change as an abandonment of history, religion, and our existing market position. Proponents of the new logo would say that our tourist industry isn't selling history or religion.
"We don't want the traditional tourists on the tour buses," one advocate of the "new" Irish leisure industry told me. "We want people four decades younger, who have lots of money, spend it freely and will come back again and again. They're not attracted by the shamrock."
But they're not necessarily put off by the shamrock, either. If you don't know the historic connotations of the shamrock, it's just a visual emblem. Something like a flower. Something green and growing. So where is the lethal disincentive to tourists implied in a green and growing thing?
If we are to go by the latest design coming from the company that dreamed up the Nike "swoosh" logo, not to mention the version of the Olympic flame used to distinguish last year's Olympic Games, the disincentive in both the shamrock and the impressionistic arms-embracing logo may lie in their lack of obvious name recognition.
The company has just been paid more than £250,000 to come up with a logo to help boost Florida's visitor numbers from 43 million to 50 million. Its widely-applauded design has nothing but letters. FLA/USA, it says, in citrus colours. Or FLA/ USA if you print it on a T-shirt.
It wouldn't make me go to Florida. But then a logo on its own is not an inducement to spend one's leisure time in one country as opposed to another, while a logo as part of a heavily branded, instantly identifiable holiday "product" is very different.
In the past, Ireland's holiday product was the John Hinde postcard product of little girls guiding donkeys with turf-filled basket, a few great writers, a few golden beaches, a meal with a knife like a dagger in Bunratty and a brightly varnished shillelagh to bring home as a souvenir. Today, we have an infinitely more sophisticated offering which is varied, active and increasingly emphasising the vibrant culture of the 1990s.
Whatever logo is finally chosen needs to be tightly integrated into our promotion of that offering. Jim McDaid's decisive uprooting of the new logo must be matched by a gardener's care in helping the old one to re-grow.