Dick Walsh was beginning to think we had lost our gift for irony and contradiction when the President appeared on television the other night admiring a famine house that had been rebuilt in New York.
The builders had used stones collected from ruined houses of the 1840s and, as Carole Coleman reported on RTÉ's evening news, their work was much admired by Mrs McAleese and others who thought it a moving tribute to those whom hunger had driven from home.
The irony lay not in the President's sensitive approach but in the Government's response on the same day to migrants seeking refuge and work on these shores. Michael McDowell had put it tartly in an article in the Sunday Independent: "Ireland simply cannot invite the huddled masses of the world to migrate here at will. It is . . . the business of government to decide in accordance with law who is admitted to live in Ireland and who is not."
So McDowell chose to forget not only those who left in the 19th century but the procession of political leaders who pleaded in Washington for our own (white and English-speaking) illegals during the last 20 years.
And the gardaí came for the Nigerians and Romanians in Dublin on Tuesday morning as they will come for others elsewhere in the State for as long as the present policy persists.
The Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat Coalition is accused of spreading fear and alarm - in spite of efforts at reassurance. Integrating Ireland, the network of refugee, asylum-seeker and immigrant support groups, said the extent, secrecy and lack of due process in this week's operations raised serious concern.
But there have been too many reports and threats of action in too many areas for any suggestion of cutbacks or job losses to be taken lightly. And, with monotonous predictability, the blows fall where they are most bitterly felt.
Miriam Donohoe reported here on Thursday that the recruitment of 800 staff to the health services had been "put on hold". Micheal Martin doesn't want this to be described as a cutback. The same applies to Tom Kitt and the reduction of €32 million in the allocation of aid to the poorest of the world's poor.
Kitt's fumbling explanation that the reduction in aid wasn't really a cut was interrupted by a growl from David Hanly on Morning Ireland: "When did the Minister for Finance discover the downturn in the economy?" This is the downturn which has caused the ceiling for the drugs refund scheme and the cost of attending accident and emergency departments to be raised - risking the health of the poorest of the Irish poor, as Liz McManus points out.
It is the downturn which is raising the cost of third-level education, disrupting services at hospitals from Monaghan to Loughlinstown and causing havoc wherever citizens depend on the State.
All of which happens under the noses of ministers - including Miracle Man McCreevy himself - but they take not a blind bit of notice. Some are too busy elsewhere: on July 5th we reported on McDowell at the Garda Depot in Templemore, telling recruits that the Government was seeking an increase of 50 per cent (from 8,000 to 12,000) in the number of people charged with drug offences in the next six years.
His aim is to achieve a 25 per cent increase in drug seizures by 2004, and an increase of 50 per cent by 2008. It sounds as if it ought to be index-linked. And if the target isn't met, what other section of the community will get it in the neck? But McDowell is not the only minister to be surrounded by thickets of confusion. Bertie Ahern was always a hopeless case: his only function in the election campaign was to smile, shake hands and shut up.
All this while Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney sorted things out and left P.J. Mara or one of his friends to deal with Rupert Murdoch, Tony O'Reilly and lesser fry in the media on Fianna Fáil's behalf.
In theory all Ahern had to do was to stay out of trouble and hope that McCreevy in particular knew what he was doing. And what he did was to go on peddling investment at knock-down prices (the lowest corporate taxes in the EU), discourage regulation and promote freedom of movement - financial, of course.
Essentially, it was handing control to corporations - a few Irish, some European, but mostly American - and trusting in the system.
There were two flaws in the scheme: first, the system didn't always work as it was meant to; second, whatever about a corporation, a government and a state could not be allowed to run on automatic pilot.
Indeed, when I wrote about the imminence of hard times in the past, some were convinced that I looked forward to the collapse of the system or to some capitalists of my acquaintance getting their comeuppance.
But, although I have little time for the more ebullient advocates of capitalism, my expectations are modest. I keep remembering a friend in London who was disappointed when an old neighbour of ours called George, who'd had the worst of things for a very long time, confessed that he didn't share our delight at the prospect of a collapse of capitalism.
The reasons were obvious: whenever, in his long life, the system had crashed - and it had happened often enough - he and his neighbours had found themselves under the wreckage.
So we'd better make the best of what we've got by reform and regulation. It's a conclusion that some gurus of the American way have already reached.