SOME of us are cursed with long memories. We keep thinking of Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf and wondering if, 1,000 years on, we shouldn't be demanding an apology from the Danes.
But long memories are sometimes less infuriating than short one, when they fail to recall relatively recent events and how they shed light on current affairs.
Take, for example, the debate on the 48-hour week. It flared up during the past fortnight but its origins were in the Maastricht Treaty, to which the electorate had long since agreed with a resounding majority.
(So long ado that Charles Haughey was still Taoiseach and Gerard Collins was Minister for Foreign Affairs. They succeeded in adding a protocol to the Treaty on abortion.)
A 48-hour week for most workers is one of the health and safety measures that are part of the treaty. Other progressive proposals were in the social chapter, which Ireland signed all the more proudly because Britain, with Thatcherite resistance to anything remotely social, did not.
Now it's the subject of a European Union directive which the Government is obliged to implement. And suddenly the air is thick with rhetoric and recrimination.
The Bill responding to the directive wad on its way through the Dail when a reservation entered by Kieran McGowan of the IDA, in a letter to an Oireachtas committee, introduced a note of controversy.
Spice was added by the letter's withdrawal in what seemed to some to be suspicious circumstances: was this, they asked, the tip of a political iceberg? The result of pressure from the Government?
The US Chamber of Commerce, which represents 400 American companies employing some 60,000 workers, threw its weight behind those who opposed the measure.
The introduction of a 48-hour week, it argued, could erode many of the competitive advantages that had led American companies to set up in Ireland in the first place.
And it didn't take long for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to line out against the change, joining those who maintained that Ireland should have followed Britain's example and opted out of the social obligation.
Y now it was standing room only in the opposition lobbies as farm leaders and the representatives of small industry took up the cry that Ireland's competitive edge was at risk and jobs would be lost.
The Government stood firm and called this nonsense, declared its willingness to be flexible, promised the introduction of the change would be phased in over three years and announced a mechanism to monitor progress.
By the end of the week employers and unions, IBEC and ICTU, seemed satisfied that, while neither side had all that its members might have wished, they had a workable compromise.
I was reminded of another debate, not about Brian Boru and the Danes (or the Norwegians, who are more likely to have been at Clontarf) but about the introduction of an equally controversial set of measures to conform with EU or EEC requirements.
More than 20 years ago, Michael O'Leary, then Minister for Labour, now an eminent judge, introduced the legislation which, at the time, was widely regarded as providing equality for women.
It provoked the same kind of resistance, only more so: some thought that, not only was half the industry in the State about to be bankrupted by women and their newly-won rights, the pillars of family and faith were about to be shaken as well.
In short, life as we knew it was doomed. And, to make matters worse, far from enjoying the fruits of change, women would be left worse off thrown out of work because it had become too expensive to employ them.
All, it was said, to satisfy some crazy bureaucrat in Brussels or a nest of feminists more militant than our own who'd burrowed their way to power in the European Parliament.
It's odd how the same arguments are repeated again and again. Years before the threat of equality in the mid-1970s, I listened to Sean Dunne, once a Labour TD for Dublin South West, talk of his time with the Federation of Rural Workers.
He'd travelled the country organising those who'd been among the poorest and most harshly treated of Irish workers since the Famine of the 1840s. And he told how some farmers argued against change: the servant boys, they said, didn't want a room in a house. They preferred to sleep in a barn or loft.
I had only lately arrived in Dublin and had to admit that, as a child, I'd heard the case made at home.
How far removed from this argument are those, like Tom Kitt, who claim to speak for workers and against a 48-hour week?
When working hours were debated in the United Kingdom last year, a senior member of the National Farmers' Union was to be heard in full flight on BBC Radio 4.
If farm labourers worked anything less than 60 hours a week, he said, they wouldn't know what to do with their free time.
He was, of course, the kind of man who'd have us believe that if young chimney sweeps had had their way, Dickens would have praised their way of life and left them to it.
The NFU man is easily mocked. No doubt he supports Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo, who are anti-social as they are anti-EU and whose example the Irish Government is urged to follow.
IT'S hardly surprising that, in what amounts to a rehearsal for an election, the centre-right coalition of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats should follow the lead of their British counterparts.
Or that some commentators who enjoy a 37-hour week and well-above-average wages should throw in their tuppenceworth with the begrudges.
For their part, the centre-left partners seem agreed that their responsibilities are not merely to respond to the advice of the IDA or the demands of its clients but extend to meeting the needs of the community at large.
I want to end here by echoing the criticism of short memories with which I began, with a comment on Pat Kenny's radio interview with Danny Morrison on Thursday.
Mr Morrison, you may not remember, was the man who came up with the description of Sinn Fein/IRA advancing with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other. He has since served several years in prison and has written a novel.
Pat Kenny's radio interview with him on Thursday will almost certainly be his softest.
As they chatted of this and that, informers and how they were viewed, family matters, the news intervened. A rocket launcher had been left near Andersonstown police station, a car-bomb was thought to have been abandoned in north Belfast, a girl of 16 was humiliated by the IRA in Armagh.
Pat and Danny chatted on. Pat asked Danny about punishment beatings, and Danny said he was against them - but the treatment the Provos dished out was nothing compared to what the community demanded.
There were no hard questions. Nothing to compare with Pat Kenny's questioning of politicians, no complaints of the kind raised by serious issues like the traffic. Or Section 31 - but that, too, was long ago. {CORRECTION} 97022700119