David Adams was in Washington DC during St Patrick's week. Though it's a violent city, judging from news reports it was still a better place to be on our patron saint's day than either the centre of Belfast or Dublin.
The occasional over-inebriated celebrant in Washington was infinitely preferable to the hordes of drunken louts that nowadays seem to attach themselves to every public gathering in Ireland, both North and South.
Having said that, Washington, or rather the American administration, didn't get off entirely scot-free. They had an Irish horde of an altogether different variety to contend with. Sober, strait-laced and deeply serious, this particular group might actually have benefited from a little alcohol-induced loosening up.
The annual St Patrick's pilgrimage by our politicians to the US is, on the face of it, an innocuous little escapade that has gradually become something of a custom over the years. Nowadays, everybody who is anybody makes their way to America to meet opinion-formers to update them (from their own perspective, of course) on the situation in the North. Some even get to meet the president.
The problem is, it has also become customary for our politicians never to have any good news to report. Long faces tell long stories of why the process isn't working as it should, and why it is everyone's fault but their own. Far from being a focal point of celebration, the White House is more akin to a St Patrick's Day Wailing Wall.
This year it was Sinn Féin's turn to take the blame. On previous occasions it was the unionists or the British and/or Irish governments. I suppose if the Americans wait around long enough, some day they will have to listen while the SDLP or even Alliance is blamed for holding everything up. The identity of the culprits might occasionally change, but the reality of nothing having moved much during the past year never does.
As we queued outside the White House, I was relieved that the delegation of which I was part was there to report substantial progress in one area at least, in stark contrast to all else.
The Chief Constable, Hugh Orde, the Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, the Policing Board chairman, Prof Desmond Rea, and two independent members of District Policing Partnerships, Mrs Mary McCrea from Strabane and myself from Lisburn, represented a complete cross-section of the new policing arrangements.
It wasn't from any sense of one-upmanship that I felt relieved, but rather from a deep sense of the context in which we were there.
With the dust having hardly settled from the horrific massacre of the innocents in Madrid, daily reports of terrorist atrocities in Iraq and the Middle East in continued violent turmoil, the Northern Ireland contingent waited patiently and purposefully in line to speak to the president about our "problems".
Even as President Bush addressed the assembled group a terrorist bomb blew apart a hotel in Iraq, killing dozens of people.
While the only remaining superpower grapples with probably the greatest threat to world peace there has ever been, our politicians, without any sense of embarrassment, still feel justified in taking up an American president's time to bemoan the lot of a prosperous, well-educated community of 1.5 million people.
What's more, a community that has already heartily endorsed at referendum a peace deal that, after almost six years, the same politicians have signally failed to implement. On top of all other shortcomings in Northern Ireland must surely sit our self-obsession and an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
How else can we explain our almost total indifference to what else is going on in the outside world and a failure to recognise how unimportant our situation actually is in comparison? Maybe our politicians have become so addicted to the attention the continued political stalemate brings that, at least subconsciously, they are finding it impossible to finally let go.
Whatever the reason, one has to wonder just how much longer the Americans will allow this annual St Patrick's Day charade to continue. Not noted for their attention span, or willingness to continue helping those who refuse to help themselves, it is to their eternal credit that they have put up with it so long already.
President Bush was clear on two points as he addressed us: the new policing arrangements are working, and therefore no excuse remains for not supporting the PSNI; all paramilitary activity must stop, and people must fully embrace democracy. No one can any longer be allowed to have it both ways.
The applause was polite, even sustained. People nodded in approval, each interpreting the president's words as an endorsement of their own immovable position.
As we were leaving the White House, news of the hotel bombing in Iraq started to filter through, whereupon a somewhat superior air was adopted. What sort of people are they? Why can't they sort it out? If only they would but realise it, after an hour spent listening to the Northern Ireland contingent, the president was probably thinking something similar.