Sadly, brokenly, this free marketer thinks that the Government should outlaw the sale of alcohol in our cities tomorrow, at least until the parades are over, and the crowds have dispersed.
The lesson of the past astonishing decade is that the conduct of the people of this country is changing far faster than the State's response to it. So, young Irish males have always lacked a certain discipline towards alcohol, which once upon a time meant much stupidity and witless good cheer.
But we crossed a lethal threshold a few weekends ago when for the first time ever, control of Dublin city centre was taken by and held by an alcohol-fuelled rabble of tribal bigots.
The key to libertarianism in any democracy is the acceptance of citizenship. Free citizens express their freedom with discipline, and regard for others. These qualities are not naturally acquired, but are socially transmitted: they are taught in schools, encouraged in families, honoured by the State, accepted as national precepts. Sounds boring? Well, it is: so too are traffic regulations - speed limits, drink-driving laws, and so on. But none are as boring as 15-year-old girls vomiting in the street, while their swaying boyfriends urinate in wavering arcs beside them, before shattering a bottle on the passing brow of some dusky stranger.
We know this, as an actuarial certainty: that there are several thousand young men who will start drinking on empty stomachs in the centre of Dublin at the first chance tomorrow morning. By noon, they will be emotionally and bladderly incontinent louts. Since we know this now, why don't we act to prevent it? Only the most dogmatic ideologue would stick to abstract principles in the face of practical realities. And these realities include a legal system which is now held in a withering and almost universal contempt, throughout all classes. So fear of prosecution will not stop young men getting drunk and violent. Moreover, no personal ethic intrudes: no social taboo applies. With the threat of violence real, the Government should pre-empt trouble. In other words, no bars open till the children are safe at home.
Yet this is truly the great national week of the entire year. The rugby schools cup finals take place, north and south: the last rugby match of the Six Nations championship is played: the great parade marches through Dublin, and as do countless others across the country: Cheltenham pits Irish horse and Irish jockey against those of our neighbours: Northern unionists in Irish regiments don and drown the shamrock: and the AIB All Ireland Club Senior Hurling and Football Championship Finals take place - for many people, the real high point of the GAA year, when the really passionate loyalties of parish and barony reach their ultimate test.
Without knowing anything whatever about it, I suspect that St Patrick's Day, March 17th, was originally the feast day on which our pagan forefathers celebrated the equinox, which Patricians transformed in the name of our patron saint. After all, Christmas day - the inheritor of the traditions of Saturnalia - is just four days removed from the equinox of December 21st. Did the same axial shift which changed the shortest day to December 21st also shift the spring equinox from March 17th to the 21st? I don't know. Indeed, I am almost equally ignorant of just about everything that is now going on in Irish life. Indeed, sometimes, I feel like a Martian. A superb private sector generates astounding levels of taxes - the greatest, per capita, in Europe - and yet almost nothing touched by the diseased hand of government works. For control of vast tracts of housing estates from Dublin into Kildare is already in the hands of narco-terrorist gangs, who decide who does what, who lives where, and who dies there.
Patients conveniently expire on trolleys in morgues, the one-hour queue at the Red Cow Roundabout, soon to be two, is the norm, immigration is apparently now beyond all check, one quarter of school-leavers are illiterate, the breast cancer scan is on for sure, we think: can you give us a call in about a month's time? No, make it two. And as for prostate scans? Shag off.
The greatest truth about Eamon de Valera's famous St Patrick's Day maidens-dancing-at-the crossroads speech, was not that it was risible, but that he genuinely had a dream. It doesn't matter how winsome and archaic it was. For dreams are not wrong things to have. The reverse. The possession of a dream was what made America great.
We badly need a dream now. We need a binding certainty that this society will once again honour law, civility and decency. We must respect Sikh and Muslim, Jew and Frank - in a way we certainly have not respected the Orange - provided they submit to our law, and consent to share with us what might enrich us. I for one cherish the day when the first Sikh garda wears the turban. But this is Ireland, not Bradford or Islamabad. We must draw the line. No Sharia law, no arranged marriages and no burka on our streets.
Instead, we seem incapable of either dream or willpower. By default, we are drifting towards a society which none of us want and just about all of us dread. And if tomorrow the streets of the capital are surrendered yet again to drunken mobs, then what lies ahead? This used to be a great time of year. It doesn't feel that way any more.
Something's gone very wrong.