Am I alone in my astonishment that Martin McGuinness was even present at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where he boasted that no Sinn Féin candidate had been called before a tribunal? Kevin Myers asks what will the peace process elevate him to next - the Consistory of Cardinals?
Still, it was nice to hear the Taoiseach - in effect - tell him to shut the f*ck up with his condemnation of corruption in the Republic. But the Taoiseach's remarks came a little late in the day - and then he spoiled it all with an assurance to the Shinner that he was just trying to be helpful.
Of course he was. The entire history of this grisly peace process has been marked by people trying to be helpful to terrorists, regardless of what they've done. By this same ignoble principle, the Taoiseach was scheduled last night to meet a delegation from the Ulster Defence Association, which is held in such contempt by the Protestant people of Northern Ireland that it can't get a single representative elected. But naturally, according to the deranged morality of the peace process, because they're People With Guns, they get access to political leaders that People Lacking Guns don't.
But is it not practical common sense to talk to PWG, rather than have them using those guns? Yes, indeed it is. But only on this condition: that you do not allow two moral universes to be created, one inhabited by democratic governments and their institutions, and another by terrorists.
This, in effect, is what the peace process, in all its abject capitulation to men of violence, has brought about: it has reduced us to the grotesque nadir that the Shinners now feel free to issues pious homilies to the democratic parties of the Republic.
And it's true: no Sinn Féin leaders have been called before any of the tribunals in the Republic. But this is because most of them at the time were involved in the kind of murderous terrorism which the peace process has managed to put beyond all further investigation. What the two governments have done - with the complicity of Washington - is to place terrorist activity outside any further scrutiny, but meanwhile leaving acts by the official security forces open both to inquiry and prosecution.
So is it any wonder that the terrorist spokesmen regularly deliver sanctimonious little sermons to the rest of us? They live in a moral cocoon created by the peace process, in which they are never held responsible for their own actions. Sinn Féin-IRA makes fortunes from illegal distilling, from cigarette smuggling and EU fraud, yet when even veiled and almost apologetic allusions are made to these activities by Dáil deputies, the Shinners start strutting up and down like turkey cocks, pompously spouting how such unwarranted allegations are endangering the peace process.
SinnFéin/IRA, of course, can endanger the peace process whenever they like. They imported guns from Florida and Russia, they engaged in terrorist activities in Colombia, they looted Castlereagh of its files and they launched covert intelligence operations against their "partners" in the Executive, and the Dublin, London and Washington governments; and all without consequence.
Was there a more perfectly abject moment in the history of appeasement than when the Taoiseach announced that he fully accepted Gerry Adams's assurance that the IRA had nothing to do with the Castlereagh raid? So why should the Shinners take him seriously from that point on? And of course, they haven't: which is why they continue to issue their oily, smarmy pronouncements on the political immorality of the Republic, even while the boycotted bones of poor Jean McConville passed up the Falls Road, and the gallant Falls Road looked elsewhere.
The books have been closed on La Mon and Bloody Friday; on Whitecross and Birmingham; on Claudy and the Missing. The official, peace process narrative of the Troubles has cast a fog over a landscape of terrorist atrocities, concealing the last days and hours of those taken by the IRA, UVF and UDA and tortured unspeakably. Instead, rising above the grey banks of politically convenient amnesia are the steeples of selected atrocities: Bloody Sunday, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Pat Finucane murder.
All else now lies under the convenient mist of peace process miasma: even to refer to the truths of what is concealed by the peace process fictions is to be "irresponsible", to "endanger the peace process", to be in "collusion with wreckers".
Instead, we are bidden to hold our tongues while the Shinners - one thumb firmly hooked behind the lapel, while the index finger of the other hand points accusingly - hector us all on our democratic duties.
You really have to be over 30 to remember the atrocities that were the staple fare of the IRA; and you need to have good intelligence contacts to know what certain individuals in the upper echelons of the movement actually did. And from behind the parapet created by libel laws and its enforcement by the courts for which they have so much disdain, and which they ignore whenever they like, they prate, pronounce and sermonise.
And frankly, I don't blame them. They've been given the freedom of the fairground that is democracy, where all rides are without charge: even if they fall off the big dipper, gravity has been abolished, for them alone.
Theirs is a land without consequence or morality, specially made for them by the peace process, in which their victims are now quite invisible. No wonder they preach. I would too.