Perhaps the greatest - and even defining - feature of Irish political culture is its central laissez-fairism: leaving well alone.
This was bred into the DNA of the Free State which had inherited so many existing institutions, such as schools and hospitals, from the British days; and since most were run by the Catholic church, there was neither the political courage nor the appetite to subvert existing authority.
This deference curtailed the normally powerful interfering instincts of those who govern. This is quite unlike the obsessive, centralised control-freakery which two world wars and the creation of a ruinous welfare state have helped create within British political culture.
Busy-bodyism is its now defining feature, embodied within the wretched duopoly resident in Downing Street, who clearly believe there is nowhere that the state should not be interfering, no conversation it should not be eavesdropping on, no thought it should not be shaping. This is the diseased mentality which recently saw an Irish student actually being charged with a hate-crime and brought to court because he asked a mounted policeman if his horse was gay.
Mix that busy-bodyist culture with the poisonous and arbitrary authoritarianism of Sinn Féin-IRA, and what you get is the ghastly hybrid, the demented griffon that is education policy in Northern Ireland.
Throughout 30 years of the Troubles, the grammar schools of the North were the bright, shining stars that helped navigate tens of thousands of pupils safely away from the sirens of violence to the shores of civility, education and self-advancement. And now the demented griffon wants to kill those schools.
The griffon was sired in Martin McGuinness's last minutes in office, as the Executive was brought down by his Sinn Féin-IRA colleagues in the Provisionals' intelligence department. Killing grammar schools was not an agreed policy of the Executive. It was not even discussed. Yet paradoxically, it was the very terrorist instincts of the Provisionals which gave him the chance to destroy the greatest educational institutions on this land, for his departing fiat could not then be overturned by an Executive which his chums had, in essence, destroyed.
The final signature of a departing terrorist warlord should have no more power over a constitutional politician than a Brazilian butterfly's wing-beat upon the path of a migrating Arctic ice-floe - but that is to ignore the busy-bodyist instincts of British politics, as represented by Northern Secretary Peter Hain. He has taken time from preening his distinguished greying temples before the mirror, not to throw the McGuinness fiat into the waste-bin as he should have done, but to implement it as policy.
Pure, unadulterated, ideological madness: busy-bodyism at its most demented - and worse, at its most irresponsible. Schools are like ancient salad bowls that convey a unique memory of garlic into every generation of lettuce that is tossed in them. It is just about impossible to make a new school as good. Old schools have survived through Darwinian principles; by retaining the best habits and traditions, tested over time, they know in their corporate bones what is good for their students individually and corporately. Yet for all their strengths, you can destroy them in a moment, as scores of superb English grammar schools were by that lunatic Shirley Williams 30 years ago.
No one supports the permanent separation of pupils at 11, nor the creation of second-tier education for the less academically gifted. The task for any education minister is not to destroy what works, but to fix what doesn't. And the grammar schools of Northern Ireland work better perhaps than any comparable educational system in Europe, for no students anywhere have had to contend with such trying circumstances.
Working-class accents are almost unknown in universities in the Republic. They are commonplace at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster. Indeed, Northern Ireland's grammar schools are responsible for creating probably the most upwardly mobile working class in the entire EU.
This is the culture the Hain-McGuinness griffon wishes to destroy, and put in its place a post-code selecting process to match pupil with some brave, new comprehensive schools.
This is precisely the hypocritical system which that contemptible caste, the Islington socialists, favour: they cluster in a single area where only the rich and privileged can afford to live, and of course, their local comprehensive school contains only the children of the upper classes.
Meanwhile, in the London equivalent of Ballymurphy or Ardoyne, intelligent, ambitious working-class pupils are held back by the aggressive indigenous cultures of boastful failure and gang-violence which are endemic in British sink-schools. The same will inevitably happen in Northern Ireland, except that the gangs will go by the names UVF, IRA and UDA.
With a Bangor in each of his bailiwicks, no doubt the Northern/Welsh Secretary gets a little confused: I dare say he often studies his in-tray and wonders sighingly if he will ever master the intricacies of Sinn Cymru or Plaid Féin. Possibly he expects to hear male-voice choirs in the Coalisland and Llurgan Valleys. All very confusing.
Prudent pro-consuls on the edges of the Roman empire did not attempt to govern, but merely administered, interfering as little as possible in the traditions of the natives. Peter Hain is now guarding the marches of the last remnant of the British empire, a poisoned chalice made more deadly by the depraved appeasement of terrorists and their incorporation, with their murderous and unrepentant ethos intact, into the body politic.
But for all the damage done so far, the destruction of those educational bulwarks that stood against total tribal war down the decades will be perhaps the most enduring evil that the peace process has yet wrought.