The time has come for Bertie to go out with Carla Bruni. He needs her. Carla seems like a nice girl. Bertie could do with a bit of diversion; at this stage we all could, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
The signs are that Carla will work well for the man we Irish Timescolumnists like to call her latest squeeze, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The past few months have been difficult for the newly elected president of France, too, you know. What with the riots and the strikes and Col Gadafy stomping all over Paris with his female bodyguards. A heartbroken Nicolas (52) learned that his wife was going to leave him. That must have been, ooh, eight weeks ago. So Nicolas is now ready to find love again.
The parallels are obvious, anyone can see that. Since his electoral triumph, things have gone a bit downhill for Bertie. His telepathic connection to the Irish public seems to be experiencing reception difficulties, and we are not sure that we are quite as mad about him as we once were.
The pay rises, the health service, the chaos in our primary schools and, above all, the collection of friends - or non-friends - who seem to have hurled money at him whenever Bertie stood still, and sometimes while he was moving.
In similarly beleaguered circumstances Monsieur Sarkozy's staff did not waste a moment. They sent Nicolas and Carla off to Disneyland outside Paris and hit the phones to every press photographer they could find. Carla is a former model (she is now a pop star in France - enough said) so she looks very pretty indeed.
There are those who may cavil that Bertie does not need to go to Disneyland. That, in fact, he seems to have lived there for a quite considerable time, with friends that even Walt Disney, with his fertile and sometimes drug-fuelled imagination, would have thought too unlikely to commemorate in plastic. But Bertie could just go to Paris, get a better suit (a much, much better suit) and hang out. Perhaps Carla, who seems remarkably sociable, might like a pint in Drumcondra.
It doesn't really matter. Because both Nicolas and Bertie realise that they live in the international celebrity culture where the expression "never a dull moment" is not so much a cliche as a law. We're just not satisfied anymore with pictures of Bertie on his holidays in Kerry or - I'm sorry, but it has to be said - singing at the blooming traditional Christmas choral service at the Department of the Taoiseach. We need action. We need romance. We need a supermodel and we need a supermodel now.
Once it was enough for a politician in difficulty to be seen going to Mass, or going down on one knee to kiss the ring of an archbishop when the going got tough; now it is absolutely necessary to aim for an appearance in Heat magazine.
God knows Bertie's daughters have done their best for him. They marry pop stars at celebrity weddings, write smash hit best-sellers, give birth to twins during the election campaign and have Hollywood films made of their work.
One hesitates to bring Bertie's daughters into this, as they seem decent young women whose loyalty to their father is most impressive.
It is not their fault that he has been taoiseach for a decade, it is ours.
The point is that, as far as the children of politicians are concerned, Bertie could not have asked for more from his daughters. Up to this they have handled the Heat magazine side of things, but now we need something else.
Do you think we should send for Posh? She seems like a nice girl, too, and she's not averse to a bit of travelling. It is really great for our purposes that Bertie lives so near the airport. Kate Moss, unfortunately, is out of the question. She's English, and not even from Manchester, which is a shame because Bertie could have taken her to some interesting dinners over there, after the matches were over.
Kate's a London girl and just that little bit too wild for Bertie. She's like someone from the High Society documentary, except that she really exists.
Or what about Erin O'Connor? She has to be part of the diaspora, God bless her. But Erin might be a little bit thin for Bertie, even in supermodel terms. Still, she would be a talking point, there is no doubt of that. And she would definitely be on for a pint in Fagan's.
Perhaps Eva Herzagovina is more Bertie's style, and ours. She's nice and womanly and, crucially, blond. The lads would love Eva. And she's from the Czech Republic, so she'd have plenty of mates to chat to over here. Eva might be the one.
Or then again things might not work out between Carla and Nicolas, and Carla might be ready to leave Paris and have a love affair in the most exciting capital city in Europe.
But brace yourselves, because Bertie will get a new girlfriend pretty soon, and he really should get a supermodel. Things really are that bad.