Shouts of political favouritism and "jobs for the boys"; the Dail suspended in uproar with a fragile coalition government accused of "dirty, low-down, mean corruption"; the country revolting over one politically-made appointment and a cabinet unable to comprehend what they unwittingly walked themselves into.
It's strangely reassuringly that, in an age of bewilderingly technological change where little seems tangible or measurable any more, Irish internal politics is still dominated by the same themes (and self-righteous screams) as exactly 50 years ago.
There are differences. Nobody, for example, has been moved to compose a ballad about Justice Hugh O'Flaherty's appointment to match the immortal lines from The Battle of Baltinglass: "There were Bren-guns and Sten-guns and whippet tanks galore/ As the battle raged up and down from pub to gen'ral store."
Charlie McCreevy shares his mistrust of "left-wing pinkos" with the late Wicklow TD, Jim Everett, who founded his shortlived breakaway National Labour Party because he regarded the mainstream Labour party - which regularly got parish priests to sign its nomination papers - as too pro-Communist.
However, while Mr McCreevy merely nominated somebody for a job in distant Brussels, Jim Everett interfered with a significant and incendiary appointment in the Irish psyche ... in a post-office in a small Wicklow town.
The after-effects of his interference made headlines around the world. It turned many in Baltinglass into a makeshift resistance army, with a war cabinet hatching plans from a disused ice-cream parlour; air-raid alarms as early warning systems against Garda invasions; telegraph poles chopped down; a pitched battle with police and Baltinglass even appointing its own airforce (actually, one ex-fighter pilot) with plans to leaflet-bomb Dublin.
They have spent millions in refurbishing Government Buildings, but Jim Everett is the one dusty ghost that ministers will not want to glimpse just now.
Hardly somebody who left an indelible impression on Irish politics, Mr Everett's sole contribution to any cabinet discussion - not concerning his beloved Wicklow - appears to have been to pass around the bag of bullseyes he always carried during any lull in the conversation.
If Noel Browne felled the first Interparty government, then Jim Everett's axe had already chopped its foundations away. In theory politicians should study Machiavelli's The Prince, but in practice today's backbenchers (with hints of the closure of rural post offices lurking in the air) might be wiser to study events in Baltinglass 50 years ago this summer.
Naturally the mother and child controversy was a thousand times more significant a watershed in Irish life, but the smaller and more parochial an event, the more TDs work themselves up into rage in the Dail about it.
The town of Baltinglass found its voice in 1950 to such an extent that protests occurred around the country. The Dail was suspended with vehement exchanges of dialogue that playwrights would have wet dreams about. Die-hard Fianna Failers happily shared the picket line with one of Montgomery's generals and a second cousin of the Queen of England; and reporters from around the world who camped out in the town speculated as to whether a communist conspiracy was orchestrating events.
Central to it all was a small, feisty woman, Helen Cooke, who was acting post mistress in Baltinglass. She took lip from nobody, kept to herself in deference to her social position (although allowing herself to engage in fiery political conversations with Father Moran, the local priest), expected telephone subscribers not to use their lines while she said the Angelus and thought nothing of interrupting the private phone calls she listened into, sharply reprimanding any use of bad language.
In the far corner stood Jim Everett, a popular ordinary working man who fought his way up through the labour movement in Wicklow, taking on formidable foes in big farmers and local employers. He was your typical hard-working local politician who, while maligned and sneered at, tops the poll at every election.
The topsy-turvy coalition against Fianna Fail in 1948 found him in government as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. Pancho Villa first act upon seizing power and being told there was not enough money to run the country was to simply order his soldiers to print more.
Mr Everett had a similar attitude to power.
Early in his ministerial career he arrived in Wicklow to find a group of local postmen at a public meeting complaining about the state of roads. He did what any quick thinking local politician would do to appease this small group of constituents. Unilaterally, and without recourse to anything as restraining as collective cabinet decision making, he announced on the spot a national pay rise for postmen.
The cabinet only discovered this when reading the papers next morning, but Noel Browne felt that, because he got away with it, this merely increased his colleagues' sneaking respect for him.
Less immediately understandable was his decision in 1948 that post office appointments could only be transferred to direct blood relations, like a son, daughter, brother or sister but not to a niece or nephew.
This was to play a crucial role in Baltinglass two years later. Although Miss Cooke had been the de facto postmistress for many years, she had initially arrived in 1936 to help her three elderly aunts run the post office. When the first two aunts died within a year of her arrival, the position was offered to her but she insisted that - while happy to continue doing all the work - the position should officially be in the name of her third aunt, Katie, a fragile woman in poor health.
Following two strokes, Katie officially resigned in April, 1950, presuming - as did everyone else - that once Helen went through the motions of officially applying for the post, she would automatically get it.
However, she was not the only applicant. A young man, Michael Farrell, (at a time when most young men were taking the emigrant ship) also applied. He had two things going for him. His family already had a thriving shop and pub in the town with space for a post office and his father was Jim Everett's right-hand-man there.
Michael was an immensely popular young man (and there was never any suggestion of wrong-doing on his part). Indeed his family was more popular than the sharp-tongued and aloof Miss Cooke. All the same, consternation broke out among the community when it was announced that Mr Everett had decided to award the position to him.
It's hard to imagine today just how political power was wielded back then, with the spoils of every local job from rate collector to rat catcher being fought over at the highest level of government.
Mr Everett may have had valid reason for giving the job to a young man, but many in Baltinglass cried corruption and Messers De Valera and Lemass (with the weight of the Irish Press) were more than happy to cry with them.
The past lives of Miss Cooke (who maintained a dignified silence throughout a campaign of disruption which Ireland had never before seen) added to her new allure. In addition to spending several years training to be a nun, it was revealed that she also fought for Ireland in Cumann na mBan, running dispatches for Dev himself.
Baltinglass split 80/20 in her favour, with Mr Farrell drawing his support mainly from the poor. One reason for this (and possibly the fervour of the whole affair) was that, back then before widespread banking, the town's shopkeepers kept their savings in the post office. As a business rival, Mr Farrell would have knowledge of their affairs, whereas Miss Cooke was neutral in such matters.
The scars of the split (and the wounds to some who stayed in the middle, but were boycotted as well) didn't heal for decades. The major "battle" occurred when post office engineers, backed by police, tried to move the post office lines to Mr Farrell's shop. On the second occasion they succeeded, but the business was boycotted and eventually Michael Farrell resigned with the lines having to be moved back to Miss Cooke. The Farrell family business never recovered and they had to leave the town.
A year or two later Miss Cooke herself resigned and the lines were transferred to one of her main supporters who became postmaster but was soon dismissed, with once again the road being dug up and the post office farcically returned to the, by then, former Cooke residence, where it still operates today.
Years ago I was approached by a consortium to write a television script about these events. It was a short-lived and strange project with, bizarrely enough, the financial backers linked to the pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Since then I've never heard Relax, Don't Do It without thinking of Miss Cooke. I still have the notes of the English researchers, including the bit where they "discovered" she was so religious she went to Mass every week. My favourite souvenir is the video of a local TD being interviewed at home, anxious to gloss over the subject as he offered around tea and ham sandwiches and was constantly reassured (never trust researchers!) that the camera was turned off.
But for all the pages of documents, they never discovered Miss Cooke's real and tragic secret. Indeed, one wonders how support might have melted away if Baltinglass had known all about Miss Cooke's previous life. Helen Cooke was an unmarried mother. Nobody knew. Tragically, not even the child who thought she was visiting her "aunt" each summer, but was in fact watching her prim blackclad mother, trapped by the silence and shame of her time, run the post office which formed the centre of Baltinglass life.
It is unlikely that An Post, which is fond of issuing stamps to commemorate all occasions, will mark the 50th anniversary of these events. Nostalgic philatelists might, however, simply follow the example of their predecessors 50 years ago by making their own rubber stamps and marking every letter sent out with the inscription that half the letters of Ireland then bore: "Baltinglass demands clean administration."
Meanwhile, having looted every other song previously recorded, perhaps some new boy band will wish to strut their stuff to the song that had them jiving in the summer of 1950: "Now the case has gone to the UN and we're waiting for the day When Truman, Attlee and McBride will come along and say, `Get back behind your parallel, drop atom bombs and gas/ And respect of boundaries and laws of sovereign Baltinglass'."
Dermot Bolger's latest novel is Temptation (Flamingo, £9.99 in UK)