You could tell it was a crisis: when the first case of foot-and-mouth disease on this island was confirmed on Thursday, Bertie Ahern was missing. Indeed he was doing what others had been asked not to do - visiting Wales.
Mary Harney took his place in Leinster House and stood by Joe Walsh and Noel Davern as all three rehearsed the now familiar story: a consignment of sheep is driven from Carlisle to south Armagh where 20 of them are discovered to have foot-and-mouth disease. The rest end up at a Kepak slaughterhouse in Athleague, Co Roscommon, from which the meat is exported to France.
On radio the Tanaiste speaks of wholesale abuse of the system and Noel Davern of a nest of fraud. An outbreak south of the Border, says Harney, would spell catastrophe for the economy as a whole.
But if she hoped we might learn from our experience, we can have little confidence in the capacity of our political leaders to do the same. For they've already had the long, expensive lesson of the beef tribunal, the shock of Ireland's exposure as a breeding ground of BSE and the almost farcical humiliation of the Ned O'Keeffe affair. They seem to have learned nothing.
The present epidemic seems to have started on a farm called Burnside in Northumberland. The local authorities, as the soft-spoken farmer admitted to the BBC, had visited the place at least four times in the past year; most recently a month before the problem was detected.
By then some of the infected animals had been taken to the south and west of England, for the man at Burnside was more dealer than farmer. He attended marts wherever he could be sure of a few pounds more, even if it meant ferrying animals hundreds of miles. And, in his keeping, they were fed swill that may well have been his undoing.
Here dealers, or tanglers, who buy and sell pigs, sheep and cattle, follow the same practices. As Peter Dargan, a vet and representative of consumer interests, explained the other day, animals are likely to be moved 14 times in the course of their lives in this country compared with an average of 1.5 moves in the Netherlands.
In Border areas, dealers' lives are often more complicated. Some are smugglers; others are, or have been, paramilitaries. It is not unusual, as John Fee of the SDLP hinted yesterday, to find men who are both. And the last thing they want to see in their areas is a police patrol. Their objections to the RUC have less to do with the nature of the force than with the nature of their own activities.
Here our defences against the disease ranged from keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for the best - during the first week of the threat - to rhetorical claims that turned out to be as porous as the "ring of steel" which, we'd been led to believe, covered the Border from end to end.
On Wednesday Mairead Lavery of the Irish Farmers' Association in Limerick told Maire O'Neill on Radio 1 how a student had explained to officials at Dun Laoghaire that she was on the way home from an agricultural college in England which had been closed because of the disease. Her name was taken.
Anne Kehoe of the IFA's sheep committee recalled on radio and television how she had worked with Charlie Bird on a programme broadcast in 1998. They'd found that 8,000 out-of-State lambs had been taken under cover into processing plants in one weekend.
This was a VAT scandal, and Carlisle was one of the marts from which the lambs came. The Revenue Commissioners had recovered funds, but the Department of Agriculture had done nothing, although the exposure infuriated the processors.
Joe Walsh's anger on being reminded of these events prevented him from explaining what exactly had changed since. Others remembered the time and expense of the beef tribunal, especially when the Dail debate began on Thursday.
"The laid-back lackadaisical approach to so much of what happens in the agricultural sphere and particularly in relation to animals is amazing," Des O'Malley said, though I doubt very much if he's amazed by it. "Apparently it has been acceptable here for a very long time."
It has indeed. Any day now we can expect to hear again that anyone who questions the activities of the food industry, beef-processors in particular, is anti-national, anti-profit, anti-bloody well everything.
The present office-holders would do well to reflect on the warnings delivered at the end of the 1980s by O'Malley and other old hands such as Barry Desmond, Pat Rabbitte, Dick Spring and Tomas MacGiolla. To reflect on the warnings and how much it has cost to ignore them.
Alan Dukes wants the Government to act as if an outbreak of the disease had happened here. Mary Upton of Labour proposes that responsibility for food - and food safety in particular - should be separated from agriculture. That, too, makes sense. And her colleague Willie Penrose proposes a ban on farmers found guilty of breaking farm production rules.
But over at the Flood tribunal Ray Burke admits that he broke exchange control laws while he was minister. Burke, of course, didn't just hold one portfolio, he held many: Communications and Industry, Communications and Energy, Communications and Justice.
He did it because "that's as I chose to do it". It was for him to make the laws, he said; up to others to impose them.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie