It takes a special talent, even for ministers, to lecture poorly paid workers in the public service on their social responsibilities.
Those brave men, Charlie McCreevy and Brian Cowen, did it in the weeks before the nurses' strike. Mary O'Rourke is still at it, this time with busdrivers and railway linesmen in her sights.
As for the public, it's reached the point where many can hardly tell the difference between Bull Island and a meeting of the Cabinet.
Like their predecessors on Scrap Saturday and Hall's Pictorial Weekly, the islanders have become more convincing than the crowd they imitate.
O'Rourke described CIE's problems on Morning Ireland yesterday as "hugely historical - they've had a long number of years with no money" (or was that a script that should have gone to the other show?).
The Minister blathered on: "The subsidy has gone up." And a moment later: "Yes, you're right, it has come down." A city the size of Dublin needed a transport system, she said. So it does; and a plan.
Her plan includes competition for Dublin Bus. Others on her side of the fence favour outright privatisation. But Dr James Wickham, who has studied public transport here and elsewhere, believes neither proposal would fit the bill.
Dr Wickham, who co-ordinated an EU-funded research project which analysed transport in Athens, Bologna, Helsinki and Dublin, wrote of the results in this newspaper on Thursday.
"Privatising Dublin Bus or deregulating public transport will hardly create the sort of transport network Dublin needs. European cities with good public transport are distinguished, not by the fact that the public transport is privately run, but by the fact that the cities are run by people with power and responsibility . . .
"Like other researchers, our studies show that an effective public transport system requires a city government with some financial autonomy, some decision-making power and some responsiveness to its local electorate . . .
"Effective city government can ensure that a city has a public transport system or network. Within that context, and only in that context, it may well make sense to put individual routes out to tender, seek private financing for new routes or whatever.
"In Dublin, by contrast, deregulation would simple mean further fragmentation and the further deterioration of public transport."
This makes sense. Indeed, it's an observation which challenges Irish political orthodoxy on several fronts. Effective local government? Corporations or county councils with real power? Integrated planning, and by local or regional authorities?
It's hardly the kind of stuff that O'Rourke and her colleagues want to hear. Although, as it affects public transport, it sounds close enough to the arguments made by Peter Bunting, of the National Bus and Rail Union, and Noel Dowling, of SIPTU, during the week.
They've been pointing to the chronic underfunding of the public transport system, which is both a signal of the poor place it has always occupied and the even poorer place to which it is bound to be consigned once the privatisers and profiteers have their way.
There are just two places lower on the list: those who must depend on the services and those who provide them, and in their own way subsidise them.
If it wasn't for people working up to 60 hours a week for £300£350, the bus and rail services would be even more debilitated than they are. Yet the bus-drivers are being told that, in the negotiations now under way, they must produce "efficiencies".
In the 1960s we accused old stonewallers like Mickey Moran and Neil Blaney of brass neck when they made impossible demands on those at the receiving end of their interminable harangues, and expected the rest of us to swallow the guff hook, line and sinker.
Some did, of course. The mesmerised faithful never batted an eyelid. And you could always find a commentator or two to take the side of the po-faced crowd maundering on about the national interest when what was really at stake was the profits of Tacateers.
Now there is no excuse, either for ministers demanding "efficiencies" or for the high priests of financial orthodoxy claiming to have the interests of society at heart. Their allies in banking, business and politics have been exposed as the real spongers on the Irish people.
Spongers or worse.
For long, we've congratulated ourselves on the introduction of free secondary education in the middle of the 1960s. It's regularly credited with having laid the foundation for economic progress.
But there never was free education, even in those happy years, after Donogh O'Malley's famous announcement and before some schools decided that parents should, after all, contribute to their costs.
Education at all levels has always been paid for out of funds raised by taxation.
What O'Malley did with such elan was to crash through the barriers of the Department of Finance before the guardians of the State's finances could shout stop.
And they would have shouted stop, partly because of a desire for tidiness but mostly for fear of having to impose and justify higher taxes. For education, for Jasus' sake.
It took guts to do it. Guts, leadership and vision. And we've never stopped praising him for it, especially now as with every day that passes O'Malley's ministerial successors show less leadership and greater determination to tie every bloody thing to a price tag.
We are still one of the least social democratic members of the European Union. Our spending on public services is lower than in most other member-states. On every front, from public transport to health, welfare and education, our public services show the effects of the neglect.
(In the eyes of those who measure progress and freedom by the absence of state intervention and low levels of public spending, of course, we've been coming on by leaps and bounds.)
Nowhere is the domination of the market more evident than in housing. We now have more than 40,000 people on official housing lists and increasing numbers of homeless people have been forced on to the streets.
All, or most, problems come back sooner or later to the business of housing and the fact that government after government, but especially the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats Coalition, insists on seeing housing as a business. Full stop.
Even our shameful, muddled, hopeless attitude to immigrants is explained in some quarters simply by the fact that we don't have enough accommodation for those who want to live here.
It's made to sound as if this were a natural catastrophe, the result of flood or drought or some other event over which we had no control. Few nowadays remember the opportunity we were offered by Mr Justice Kenny and his committee in the 1970s, who recommended a means for local authorities to acquire land for building. An opportunity successive governments refused to take for fear of offending their allies and subscribers in the building industry.
Fewer still remember that when we followed Margaret Thatcher's example and sold off local authority houses over a decade later we never bothered to replenish the stock. Padraig Flynn, who took the decision to sell, might be asked why now that he's back in business here.