At 12.35 p.m. yesterday the Government jet touched down at Dublin Airport from Northolt outside London with a vast and previously unsuspected archive of manuscript material by James Joyce on board.
After Ms Síle de Valera descended from the aircraft clutching the precious booty, it was put on display to the waiting media in the presence of the Taoiseach.
Mr Ahern professed himself very glad to be in attendance at the acquisition of these memorials of the work of a fellow famous Drumcondra resident.
Following this, it was removed to the National Library of Ireland, which will be its future home.
Frustratingly enough, only a glimpse of the collection was offered at yesterday's event.
Further details of it will emerge today. What is clear is its cost: €12.6 million (£8 million sterling).
Much of this will come from the rolling Heritage Fund established by Ms de Valera as Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands to provide precisely for purchases such as this.
Some €6.8 million will be provided courtesy of Allied Irish Banks, which will benefit from a tax write-off in respect of its contribution.
The documents were acquired from Mr Alexis Léon, of Paris, and his wife. They came to Mr Léon from his father, Paul Léon, Joyce's friend and helper. After Léon's death at the hands of the Nazis in 1942, the papers became the property of his widow, Lucie, and remained in the Léon family thereafter.
While details of the collection are still very sketchy, it is already clear that its main importance lies in the new light it throws on the composition of Ulysses.
The Finnegans Wake material consists of amended proofs, which certainly will have their own interest, but the Ulysses documents seem to be very early drafts of episodes of the book for which, in some cases, no such manuscripts were previously known to exist.
They seem to be quite similar to the early draft of the "Eumaeus" episode which was sold last year in London, and which caused justifiable excitement - and that was only one manuscript, whereas this collection consists of 19 documents, at least eight of which appear to be Ulysses drafts.
At one bound, therefore, the National Library, which already had impressive Joyce holdings, has established itself as one of the world's major Joyce repositories, on a par, at least, with Buffalo, Cornell, Yale, Texas, etc. The new acquisition will play a major part in the celebrations of the centenary of Bloomsday in 2004.
Looking back, in response to a question, on the vexed relation of Joyce to this country, the Taoiseach, perhaps with the Roy Keane saga in mind, opined that harsh things might have been said in the past, but that the greatness of the writer was acknowledged here unequivocally.
And yesterday's acquisition, with the price paid for it, goes a lot further than any words to prove the truth of that proposition.