The debate about a new national anthem more suited to modern Ireland has lapsed into silence of late, writes Frank McNally.
But as often happens in quiet moments, I have had a blinding flash of insight on the subject. It happened at the cinema the other night when I was watching - of all things - a documentary about Leonard Cohen, the aptly-named I'm Your Man.
The great songwriter's work is often dismissed as depressing, and much of his earlier stuff certainly was. But he has lightened up in old age: a process helped by his recent spell in a Zen monastery, where he became a monk. Even before that, the signs were there. In fact, as the documentary reminded me, the new, happier Cohen was already in full voice on a 1992 song called - wait for it - Anthem.
Anthem is about acceptance and serenity. It warns of the futility of expecting perfection in this world and says that wisdom comes to us through mistakes. The message is driven home in its uplifting chorus: "Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack, in everything/ That's how the light gets in." And as I listened to those inspiring lines again, it hit me that Cohen had unwittingly summed up the state of modern Ireland. The port tunnel leak. The de-bonding Luas tracks. The e-voting debacle. There is a crack in everything! That's how the light (and the water, and the Dutch computer hackers) gets in.
It was as if, in calling the song simply Anthem, he had left room for the words "Irish" and "national" to be added as a prefix. But the beauty of his message was that, rather than despair about our mistakes and failures, we should embrace them and draw on them a source of wisdom.
On the way home, still inspired by his words, I passed the Millennium Spire, which in a sense inverts his metaphor by being illuminated from within. Indeed, given the record of public projects in Ireland, the wonder in this case is that light ever got out. But of course it didn't get out as originally envisaged by the spire's designer, who wanted a soft glow.
Technical problems meant the soft glow was not practicable, so we ended up with what looks like a strip of tinsel at the top. No matter. Full of the new spirit of acceptance urged by Cohen, I was now ready to embrace the spire, with all its imperfections (until a Garda asked me if I'd been drinking and told me to move along).
The earliest inhabitants of this island would have known exactly what Cohen was talking about. They built Newgrange with a crack that means the light gets in on the darkest days of the year. That was deliberate, of course.
But if you've ever walked up the narrow tunnel into its inner chamber, you'll know that you have to stoop not to hit your head. Maybe that was a mistake. Perhaps the neolithic project engineers ignored warnings that the height restriction would make it unsuitable for a new generation of so-called "super-humans".
Either way, thanks to Newgrange, using Cohen's song as an anthem would stress the continuity of 5,000 years of life on this island. And if that's not enough to clinch the argument, the alternative meaning of "crack" (or "craic" if you insist) surely does. This would not be lost on Phil Coulter, who would probably be commissioned by the Government to produce an arrangement of the song suitable for the Army No 1 Band. I'm guessing Phil would rewrite the final chorus as "There is crack in everything", to represent the sense of fun endemic in the Irish character.
When he wrote Anthem, Cohen was not consciously offering the song for sponsorship by any country with a vacancy. But we know he's short of money these days, and he might well be open to offers. Although he won a legal case this year against his former manager over the millions of dollars he says she misappropriated, it is not clear if he will ever be compensated.
It was of course a rather unfortunate twist by which Cohen emerged from the monastery to find a large deficit in his retirement fund. There was a crack in that too, it turned out. But as far as Ireland's new national anthem goes, I say: he's your man.
The Diary welcomes publication of a volume setting the record straight about famously witty things that people never said. The thesis of the Yale Book of Quotations is that many celebrated quotes were invented or improved after the fact until, through popular conspiracy, they became part of the record.
It is typical that we in Ireland should stand this global trend on its head. The Yale book arrives, aptly, as we mark the 30th anniversary of then Minister for Defence's "thundering disgrace" comment that caused the resignation of a president. This is the public record of the quote, recorded verbatim by the only journalist who was there.
Unfortunately, its credibility has always suffered from the fact that it makes Paddy Donegan sound like a 19th-century editorial in the Times of London. Most people in Ireland still prefer - wrongly - to believe he said something stronger. Cearbhaill Ó Dálaigh himself thought there were at least two expletives cut from the original, which may even have influenced his decision to resign.
There must be other such examples. I wonder if Yale would be interested in a companion volume?