Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney dropped in on colleagues in Dublin this week, then set out for the wider world, leaving colleagues and the State as they've been for years - on autopilot.
Since Bertie Ahern is trying to win a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations and Mary Harney is leading the biggest trade mission we've sent to the Far East, we're bound to wish them well. But Ahern's case would carry more weight if wealthy Ireland had ever come within an ass's roar of the UN's target for overseas development aid or had cut the selfish strings attached to seemingly altruistic policies. And it's ironic that Ms Harney's message to the Chinese and their neighbours will stress Ireland's growing attachment to some of the meanest features of the American way of life.
Ahern started his campaign with an appeal that had an almost old-fashioned air. In his version, the Republic was a small state in tune with the needs of other small states, sympathetic to the weak and poor. Not an acolyte of the US or any other great power. He promised that the overseas development aid target, 0.7 per cent of GNP, would be reached by 2007. But the target was set 20 years ago and only once has Ireland managed to get to the halfway mark.
Far from putting its money where Ahern's mouth is, the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrat coalition has lowered its sights since 1997, indeed since the announcement of an "interim target" of 0.45 per cent at the FF ardfheis in March. The promise made in New York had been made and broken so often it hardly seemed worthwhile complaining about the self-serving conditions attached to aid by wealthy donor states or the bureaucratic delays in getting EU aid to those who need it. (The Labour Party, as Michael D. Higgins pointed out, has already committed itself to reaching the UN target within two years of arriving in office).
Ahern's rhetoric might still have offered a grain of hope if the coalition's dismal record on immigration and this State's failure to reduce the gap between rich and poor at home had not been so shamefully obvious. But even as the UN campaign began, the Irish Refugee Council pointed out that the State would have to comply with 52 recommendations before its treatment of refugees reached European standards.
And Denis O'Brien of the St Vincent de Paul Society, in a contribution to this newspaper, was driven to ask whether the social partners and all the political parties had "sold out on the poor".
Both Taoiseach and Tanaiste might have been able to concentrate single-mindedly on their tasks if the Government's last foreign adventure - Hugh O'Flaherty's nomination to the European Investment Bank - hadn't collapsed ignominiously in their hands. As it was, the statement by Ahern which received most attention at home was about the botched attempt to recover from the O'Flaherty affair by offering to nominate Jim Mitchell as vice-president of the EIB.
Ahern made a comment of sorts in sentences that set out to say something but somehow ran into the sand before getting to the point: his denials are beginning to sound more and more like Denis Foley hoping against hope that he was not, after all, the holder of an Ansbacher account. All of which left Charlie McCreevy to brood over the ashes of his own ambitions for the former judge while a tide of public anger, frustration and resentment rises around him.
Where, in the face of inexorable inflation and an imminent oil crisis, is the confidence which once advised the electorate to "party on" and dismissed his critics as "pinko liberals"? Willie O'Dea, Dermot Ahern, John O'Donoghue, Sile de Valera and the rest ooze uncertainty as they pray for change before they must face the electorate. McCreevy, with his guff about not being the resigning kind, is no better than the others.
Certainty alone is not an answer. The most assured voice in Irish politics this week was that of Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber. He told Marian Finucane with chilling conviction that for Northern nationalists facing unionist dominance violence was the only way. No ifs. No buts. No regrets. She protested, mildly. He brushed her protests aside. Violence provided the leverage the nationalists needed. She thanked him for the interview.
This is the certainty that a rudderless Government and timorous Opposition will face in the next election. And has the Government made the right choice in planning to nominate Michael Tutty of the Department of Finance as vice-president of the EIB?
He was last in the limelight when he was among the witnesses who appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, famously chaired by Jim Mitchell, during its investigation of the DIRT scandal. The results of the investigation are still incomplete, as financial institutions pay the taxes and penalties they owed and the regulators study the reforms proposed by a PAC study group. But during the hearings there was a great deal of discussion about a certain superintending inspector's memorandum - SIM 263 to those who'd become familiar with the arcane ways of the Revenue Commissioners, the Central Bank and the Department of Finance.
It seems it was not uncommon for senior officers in the Revenue Commissioners to send round a memorandum effectively postponing action - say, until resources became available to put it into effect. Except that in the case of SIM 263, the instruction to hold fire was never rescinded. And to add to the mystery no one seemed to know who'd written and dispatched the document, though witness after witness was questioned on it.
Some thought the author was an executive who had since died. There were rumours that it might have been someone who had left the service. But no one doubted what SIM 263 meant or how diligently it had been obeyed.
"But," said Pat Rabbitte, during the session of September 1st, 1999, "someone somewhere in the system decided that section 37 . . would not be operated. We have established that much . . ."
Without a blink Michael Tutty replied: "No. We have established that it was not operated. We have not established that somebody consciously decided that it would not be operated."
They have the man for the job, all right. And Yes Minister is ninth in the British Film Institute's top 100 television programmes, a list led by Fawlty Towers and Cathy Come Home.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie