What kind of society is this, where train drivers are abused from a height for their dispute and a bomb which might have been used in mass murder merits only a murmur of disapproval?
What are we to make of media which devote acres of space and hours of airtime to bullying the drivers' leader Brendan Ogle but give little more than perfunctory coverage to the discovery of the 500lb bomb?
And what of the parties which hide behind media coverage of the railway dispute and, like the media, seem loath to raise their voices against those who, on the eve of the Apprentice Boys' march, drove a vanload of explosives into Derry?
It's not as if time and space had been used to explain both sides of the admittedly complicated industrial dispute. Far from it - much, if not most, of the news coverage has managed to sound like opinion. And the opinion has been all but unanimous: the drivers are wrong; their actions defy a union-management agreement (on which they didn't vote), cause inconvenience to the public and break the law.
Opinion is not altogether unanimous about the best way to respond to the problems presented by these actions. But most critics appear to believe that competition is the answer: they call for privatisation.
This is to ignore the British experience of privatisation and to forget the origins and history of Coras Iompair Eireann and Iarnrod Eireann, indeed of many State and semi-state companies in the public service. It's to forget that, in Ireland, transport services were indeed provided by numerous companies that were privately owned and operated, until the private companies found them unprofitable and in the end impossible to run.
CIE was treated, not as a company set up and run with public service in mind but as a necessary evil.
It wasn't a pitch on which great political games were played so much as a piece of waste ground for political practice matches. The company was starved of funds by governments of all shades. Few ministers had a clear view of public service; none had any sense of the importance of public transport or shared the attachment of railway families to the railways.
CIE was overseen by boards whose members took their cue from the politicians who appointed them; managers in turn were infected by the pervasive air of cynicism. For politicians and public to turn on the train drivers now is to blame them for the inevitable results of underfunding and indifference; for the cynicism and ineptitude of their managerial and political bosses.
It's also to forget the decades in which train drivers' wages were among the lowest and their conditions close to the most exhausting endured by workers in the public service. Indeed, politicians, commentators and public might pay more attention to the unrest in the public service and ask themselves why it's growing and what the consequences of the increase will be. They might ask who is most seriously affected by inflation and why the latest figures - 6.2 per cent and rising - don't even rate a comment on a card from Charlie McCreevy.
In the meantime, there are reports of staff shortages in the health service; Sister Stanislaus Kennedy draws attention to the needs of homeless women, and a reward of £1.7 million shared by two senior executives who saw Eircom through to privatisation. A State bank, ACC, finally coughs up almost £18 million in tax, interest and penalties.
Yet a stranger might have been forgiven for imagining that the most serious threat to life as we know it was posed by Brendan Ogle and the Irish Locomotive Drivers' Association. But, as some smug radio interviewers have taken to reminding their interviewees, that's capitalism. As if that explained everything and nothing could be done to change it.
Those who drove the vanload of explosives into Derry had different targets in view. The first was - according to reports - the Apprentice Boys' march and the agreement between its organisers and local nationalists that it should be a peaceful occasion; the bigger target was the Belfast Agreement itself.
This newspaper's comment about enormous damage, had the bomb exploded, was no exaggeration. Location, event and timing - to coincide with the second anniversary of Omagh - were chosen for devastating effect. Yet the only official reminder of Omagh last weekend was a timid statement by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern vaguely hoping for public co-operation in the search for those responsible for the worst paramilitary attack of the last 30 years.
The Blair-Ahern statement served to remind us of the promise of draconian legislation in the Dail and at Westminster, to be followed, we'd been led to believe, by effective action against the so-called "Real IRA". There was no action, though the Dail passed the legislation and many who worried about its impact on civil liberties stifled their concerns to support it in the interests of the peace process.
Now, the main concern seems to be to avoid action against the bombers at all costs. And the concern from the mainstream parties is shared by the bombers' erstwhile political allies. A few days before the Derry bomb was stopped Gerry Adams, on a visit to south Armagh, said the British government was using "the spectre of dissident republicans" as an excuse to slow the pace of demilitarisation.
Some spectre. Within a week, it had driven through a barrier in Derry with its cargo of explosives. A few days later, with little fuss or attention from the wider world, Omagh remembered its loss. And Gerry Kelly, Adams's colleague, spoke of their refusal to advise co-operation with the police in the search for the Omagh bombers because the RUC is a corrupt force.
Has fear of division in the republican movement now turned to fear of antagonising the splinter groups which the split created?