So many promises. So much activity. So little done. It's been a bloody awful week.
It was, to be sure, a crowded agenda.
In the Dail, where the McCracken Report, decommissioning, Cabinet confidentiality and Ray Burke's political windfall were down for discussion.
In the committee rooms, where Mary Robinson's departure and John Hume's refusal to take her place suddenly presented parties with a problem which had to be faced. Now.
In the North, where everyone's attention had fastened on what the unionists might do - until the Provisional IRA chose the moment to remind everyone why it was so difficult for the unionists to decide.
These weren't separate issues which, by curious coincidence, fell to be decided - or at any rate discussed and, in the current lingo, moved forward - in a single hectic week.
They were connected in a way that usually strikes fear into the hearts of politicians, who may cope with two related issues but find the strain of steering a consistent line through half a dozen all but unbearable.
Now here was Mr Justice Brian McCracken, with a report which everyone could praise for its clarity and precision. And everyone, from the Taoiseach to the humblest backbencher in the remotest constituency, duly praised it.
McCracken exposed all that was, to say the least, ill-judged and, at worst, dishonest or even dangerous in the way in which Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry had accepted money from businessmen.
"The possibility that political or financial favours could be sought in return for such gifts, or even given without being sought, is very high, and if such gifts are permissible, they would inevitably lead in some cases to bribery and corruption.
"It is also not acceptable that any person or commercial enterprise should make such gifts in conditions of secrecy, no matter how well intentioned the motives may have been."
IT couldn't be plainer. Mr Justice McCracken wasn't talking about illegality here; he'd accepted, too, that in the cases under review no favours had been sought or given. He was talking about gifts which, if they were permissible, would inevitably lead in some cases to bribery and corruption.
But no sooner had his work been praised on all sides than the Dail, faced with the challenge to act on what might be described as matters arising, turned its back on him.
Specifically, the coalition of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats refused to ask another judge in a new tribunal to investigate the Ansbacher accounts, with their £38 million deposits, other than for payments to politicians.
And, though the Government agreed to some minor Opposition amendments, it refused point blank to include in the tribunal's terms of reference an acknowledged payment of £30,000 to Ray Burke before the 1989 general election.
The excuse for refusing to inquire into the Ansbacher accounts was that it would be unfair to the super-rich depositors, since they'd been discovered by chance by McCracken's team; in any event it was a job for the Revenue Commissioners.
I wonder who dreamed this up. If we knew we could put them in touch with Gerry Stembridge, who's bound to need help with Scrap Saturdays of the future. They could work on successors to Mara and the Boss.
But, as they say, back to the Dail, where John O'Donoghue listened without a blush while colleagues suggested, near as dammit, that anyone caught out by chance should be let go. (If only Mr Haughey had thought of it.)
It didn't seem to knock a feather out of the Minister for Justice. But that's zero tolerance for you: the crooks you're after don't have accounts in the Cayman Islands or get drafts from supermarkets; they hang around corners and steal food and stuff from the shelves.
The second leg of this astonishing excuse was that it should all be left to the Revenue Commissioners, the team that has proved so effective for the last 20 years that it's now being asked to tell the new tribunal how 'twas done.
BUT it was Mr Burke's statement to the Dail - and the feeble questioning by much of the Opposition - which led some who heard it to suspect that, with the exception of John Gormley of the Green Party, Dick Spring and Pat Rabbitte, the wagons were once more being arranged in a very wide circle indeed.
Tom Garvin once wrote that Thatcherism was Margaret Thatcher's political legacy but Mr Haughey didn't have an ism to his name. He was wrong, for a change: Haugheyism is a way of dealing with questions and questioners.
"Oh, that meeting," worked for Mr Haughey, for a while. He probably thought it would see him through to the end. Mr Burke was a keen student of Haugheyism, even when he voted against his leader. But he hasn't mastered Haugheyism and I doubt if he will.
His account of the 1989 donation may have satisfied his colleagues, and the PDs, for heaven's sake: Michael McDowell must be spinning in his monastic cot. To the rest of the population it sounded like one of Bob Newhart's performances. Remember his telephone conversation with Walter Raleigh soon after he'd discovered tobacco?
Well, Mr Burke's story sounded almost as odd: So this guy walked in off the street, yah? You didn't know him from Adam, right? And he tosses a couple of packages into your lap?
And then he leaves and you open the package and there's the dosh - thirty grand. Jee-sus.
But Mr Burke's account was delivered to the Dail and the public reaction, as far as can be gauged at present, was incredulous.
Someone who'd listened to the statement and the questioning that followed was angry with both sides of the House and came up with an old Mylesian description of the Dail: a magisterium of chancers.
Mr Burke's line in the sand, when it was all over, was, to put it at its kindest, unconvincing. In Mr Burke's case it sounds like Tom Nisbet's famous description of the bishops "episcopating against the wind." And when he and Bertie Ahern claim he was being judged on 1997 rules for something that happened in 1989, they forget that the activities for which Mr Haughey and Mr Lowry are now castigated also preceded McCracken and attention to ethics in government.
The Government must be given credit for the progress it has made on a referendum to modify the restrictions imposed by Cabinet confidentiality - the legacy, it may now be forgotten, of another period of concern with ethics.
The concept was invoked, as it happens, to prevent Mr Burke from giving evidence to the beef tribunal about how certain government decisions were made.
What must not be forgotten by Mr Burke and his colleagues, especially Mr Ahern, is that if he, as this State's Minister for Foreign Affairs, is to encourage and influence the negotiations about to begin in Belfast, he must have an unquestionable record at home.