Last week the political message most clearly heard was about the need for trust between the parties in Northern Ireland. This week the emphasis is on lack of trust between leaders and led in the Republic.
The Government, it seems, doesn't trust the opposition, the commentators or the public to debate the most extensive - and most expensive - development plan in the history of the State.
The plan provides for spending of £38 billion, most of it by the State, on social and economic development over the next seven years.
The Department of Finance devised the strategy. The cabinet approved it on Wednesday. Other departments will add their tuppence worth in the next few weeks.
The final, varnished version will be published with the usual pomp and pap in September and presented to the European Commission in October.
It may bear some relationship to the Economic and Social Research Institute's report on national investment priorities which was published in March.
That led some to hope that, after decades of minding the ha'pence and the pence, the emphasis would switch to making this a more equal place, a society worthy of the name.
However, apart from Mark Brennock's report on Thursday and the comments it provoked, there has been no public debate about the plan's provisions.
There's no knowing how they relate to the ESRI's suggestions or whether the Government has paid a blind bit of attention to a sackful of reports on shameful divisions in this republic.
As Derek McDowell, of Labour, wrote here yesterday, we are the first generation of Irish people who can decide what we want as a nation and then go out and pay for it.
So why is it that the sense of excitement and adventure which this should inspire is missing?
In a week in which we've seen all too clearly what some of our once admired politicians and supposedly dependable protectors of the public interest are made of, do we need to ask?
The Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell's report to the public accounts committee of the Dail on bogus non-resident accounts in financial institutions was published on Wednesday.
It quoted an official estimate that, in 1993, 50 per cent or more of the £4 billion held in so-called non-resident accounts was in fact "fraudulently designated." The holders were resident in this State.
The estimate was from the Department of Finance, but the department was not alone in its knowledge. The Central Bank and the Revenue Commissioners also knew that wholesale tax evasion was going on.
The banks knew - they connived at it. Successive ministers for finance knew - their officials told them so.
But, as Maurice O'Connell, now governor of the Central Bank, once a senior official in the tax and foreign exchange sections of the department said to the Comptroller and Auditor General:
"Everybody agreed it was wrong. For God's sake, whatever you do don't rock the boat. The boat being the exchange rate. That was the culture."
But there was another side to this culture of wink and nod, official cynicism and political cowardice, as Peter Cassells told Brian Farrell on Prime Time.
And on the other side were people who had to do without services the Government couldn't pay for or who had to pay more than their fair share to make up for the taxes the scroungers got away with.
And, all the while, the po-faced preachers of wage moderation and belt-tightening made their rounds as if they wouldn't - or couldn't - be found out.
On Tuesday, the day on which Mr Purcell reported to the public accounts committee, Bertie Ahern turned up at Dublin Castle to give evidence on Charles Haughey's affairs to the Moriarty tribunal.
Mr Ahern has a memory that would make a goldfish blush. He seems to have forgotten more about his old mentor's tangled web than the tribunal is likely to learn.
On Tuesday he couldn't remember a damned thing about many of the mysterious cheques that he and his boss had signed.
There was the £25,000 cheque made out to cash which found its way from the leader's account into an account linked, as The Irish Times delicately put it, to Mr Haughey's personal finances.
The leader's fund, mark you, is not money scrounged from the Dunnes, the Doyles or the Gallaghers, bullied from banks or wheedled from cronies who have yet to appear at Dublin Castle.
It's the State's money which, as you hardly need to be reminded this week of all weeks, is largely collected from those who pay tax as they earn.
Allowances are paid to the leaders of parliamentary parties - the bigger they are the more they get - to help defray expenses. The theory is that this promotes parliamentary democracy.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, yearly payments to Fianna Fail ranged from £181,000 to £196,000 and the total ran to more than £1 million. Payments from the leader's account in this period required the signatures of Mr Haughey and Mr Ahern. (A third signatory, Ray McSharry, had become a European Commissioner.)
A payment of £25,000 would have been memorable and a cheque for £25,000 made out to cash even more so. Mr Ahern said on Tuesday that he couldn't remember it.
Nor could he remember signing any of a series of six cheques for sums ranging from £5,000 to £12,914 in 1991, three made out to cash, two to AIB, where Mr Haughey had an account, and one to Celtic Helicopters.
But, then, Mr Ahern sometimes signed blank cheques and passed them on - for administrative convenience, y'see.
At Dublin Castle he admitted that "depending on the information unearthed by the tribunal, it may transpire to be an inappropriate practice".
Or, as they might have told him in the bars around Drumcondra, this joint signature stuff doesn't work when one man signs a blank cheque but doesn't know to whom or for how much the second makes it payable.
It certainly doesn't work when the signatory to whom the cheque is given happens to be Charles Haughey, a politician who can't even be trusted with a contribution for an ailing colleague.
And even 10 years ago anyone who failed to see the risk in Mr Haughey's case couldn't have been minding his business. Or ours.
BUT Mr Ahern's memory is notoriously untrustworthy. If Albert Reynolds was happy to be known as a one-page man, his successor is even less gifted with powers of concentration.
Remember the developer Tom Gilmartin? The Sheedy case? The Burkes, Ray and Joe? The appeals commissioner who reduced Haughey's tax liability to zero? The donation made to Padraig Flynn?
If you remember all or most or, indeed, any of these you're doing better than the Taoiseach. His memory of each case had to be jogged - in some instances, more than once.
So he's most unlikely to remember Haughey's criticism of Alan Dukes during a Dail debate on the Budget in January 1986. Deposit interest and non-resident accounts were being discussed.
Haughey, then leader of the opposition, said the minister's speech contained more mysteries than an Agatha Christie novel.
And when Mr Dukes complained that he hadn't heard the opposition say how a particularly tricky tax problem could be solved, Haughey briskly suggested: "Rob another bank."
"l will get to that, too", the minister replied, "and I will not go too far back."