The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, must be regretting quoting Mark Twain on Wagner's music - "It sounds much worse than it actually is" - when he was talking about farm incomes just before Christmas.
Mr Walsh quoted Twain in the context of the Irish Farmers' Association's claims that farm incomes would be down by more than 20 per cent last year. The drop came in at 8.5 per cent.
Mr Walsh clearly was unaware that the Limerick man who leads the IFA, Mr John Dillon, is not a Wagner fan. His favourite musician is Richie Kavanagh, the country singer from Carlow who delivered such songs as "Aon Focal".
Yesterday, Mr Dillon was sucking diesel at the head of a motorcade of tractors heading for Dublin through Joe Walsh's home town of Clonakilty. The sign on one of the tractors read: "We gave you two FF-ers and you gave us F-all", referring to Mr Walsh's own constituency, where he brought in a second Fianna Fáil TD at the election.
More than a thousand tractors were on the roads in various parts of the State yesterday as the IFA's week-long "tractorcade" protest over farm incomes started rolling towards Dublin for a demonstration on Friday.
While the Joe Duffy radio show provided a platform for some farmer-bashing, people along yesterday's routes came out of their houses to clap the tractor men.
It was a good-humoured day, but the potential for the disruption which could be caused by hundreds of tractors on main roads was evident.