You may have see that the Public Offices Commission is seeking some specific changes to the current ethics legislation.

According to the commission's recent report, there are shortcomings in the law. For example, the case in which the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, and the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, took a holiday in a villa owned by businessman Mr Ulick McEvaddy did not involve any breach of the Ethics Act, but highlighted the fact that a relative or friend can make gifts to an office-holder without being obliged to disclose this.

Also, the "difficulty in defining a friend" complicated the task - the commission suggested that "the parameters of what constitutes a friendship" may have to be defined in legislation. About time too. The whole notion of friendship is long overdue for some serious consideration at the highest levels. There is far too much airy-fairy nonsense talked about friendship, almost as much as about its nefarious companion, love (the ultimate four-letter word), and the result is often a great deal of mischief and confusion. The legislators might start by establishing the precise distance between a casual friend and a close companion, and set out the exact definition of a social acquaintance, a drinking buddy, a pal, a boon companion, a friend in high places, a false friend, a fair-weather friend and a friend at court. After that, they might carefully establish the parameters of a platonic friendship, marking it off from the rather jollier gin-and-platonic relationship. They might also decide once and for all if a friend in need is a friend indeed, or just - as many of us suspect - a bloody nuisance.

The Old Pals' Act will have to be rewritten, that's for sure. We will have to define more accurately what constitutes a nodding acquaintance, and how it differs from a passing acquaintance. We must reconsider the notion of the dog as man's best friend, where it came from, and how cats must feel about it. We must also investigate the mysterious provenance of the Unknown Benefactor, a friendly character who turns up everywhere in modern Irish politics, but is strangely reluctant ever to be named.

The regrettable way in which some perfectly good and enduring friendships sometimes mutate into love will have to be considered, as will the nerdy notion that strangers are just friends you haven't yet met.

There is a lot of work to be done and the sooner we get started the better.

As if all this were not sufficiently complicated, the Public Offices Commission has also called for an extension of the definition of a "connected person". By current legal definition, this peculiar creature is either a relative or a business associate, and the commission would like to see the definition extended to include any person who has given a gift to the relevant office-holder.

With the "hand of friendship" having been clearly extended to so many public figures by so many people in recent years, it may well be that if and when the definition is extended, there will turn out to be more "connected persons" than those without connections.

That is when we, the disconnected, will have to make our stand.

Cut adrift, disjointed and separated as we are by definition, it won't be easy. We will be up against the joined-up people, the connected, which is to say the well-connected: connected not only to the people in power, but to each other.

We will have to make a virtue of our aloneness, of the fact that we have acted not in concert, but one by one, out of individual contrariness. We will stress that we have deliberately ignored the so-called bonds of so-called friendship, which so often (at least in the cases which come before the Public Offices Commission) turn out to be the manacles of friendship. We will be making the point that simply because we are not friendly with certain people does not imply enmity, but that we reserve the right to choose or change at any given time. We take no particular pleasure in our disconnected state, but we do not envy in any way the connected. We stand out there, each of us alone, removed, singular - each of us an island and none of us a part of the main, no matter what John Donne or anyone else might think.

bglacken@irish-times.ie