Bertie Ahern spent several days this week explaining Ireland to Romano Prodi. Is it too much to hope that, when the visitors have gone, he might spend a couple of days explaining his Government's thinking to the rest of us?
As things stand, no one seems to know what the hell is going on. While the North lurches dangerously towards renewed violence, the Republic looks as if it's on a slippery slope from confusion to hysteria over the European Union.
It can't have been easy trying to convince the president of the European Commission that, in spite of our No to Nice and a string of distinctly contrary statements by Ahern's colleagues, we were still devoted supporters of the European Union.
Of course, Charlie McCreevy, Mary Harney, Sile de Valera, Michael McDowell, Eamon O Cuiv and Willie O'Dea profess to be dedicated Europeans. Some of them fiercely resent being called Eurosceptic and say any resemblance with the Eurosceptics next door is purely coincidental.
It's just that they, too, dislike the Union's direction, find fault with its structures and suspect that most of its members are hell-bent on turning this into a social democratic state. One in which capital and corporation taxes are used to pay for decent public services.
This is not how others in the Coalition like them to be portrayed. For example, when Dermot Ahern was asked to explain McCreevy's view of the Government's defeat on Nice as a healthy development, the best he could do was, "Ah, that's just Charlie."
Imagine Prodi's reaction if he'd been told. "Just Charlie, you say. Thank God for that. For a minute I thought he was the Minister for Finance."
But as the other sceptics step forward to make their complaints about the unforgivable democratic deficit in Europe, how many of them bothered to acknowledge, let alone propose to remedy, the even more pronounced democratic deficit in Ireland?
If we are poorly informed about developments in the EU, whose fault is that? Irish governments - and this Government in particular - are largely to blame. They neither discuss, nor do they encourage discussion of, most developments.
If little attention is paid to Dail debates on EU summits, it's because, as often as not, they are debates only in name: the Taoiseach usually reads a prepared script. Without interruption. With never a question or answer.
In an effort to improve the flow of information, the Labour Party produced a private member's Bill on Thursday proposing that all EU directives, regulations and conventions be considered by the Oireachtas before being supported (or even opposed) at European level by Irish ministers.
Ruairi Quinn said he expected the Government to accept the underlying principles of the Bill next week. On Friday, Mark Brennock quoted a spokesman who said the Coalition would not: the Government would make decisions on how to proceed only after its planned Forum on Europe had deliberated on the subject.
This, by the way, was the forum which Labour proposed in March and the Coalition finally agreed to set up to cover its confusion at the result of the referendum.
It's up to Ministers to refer measures to the Oireachtas committee which debates EU legislation.
When ministers fail to inform the committee, a measure may slip through which might have been opposed or changed if it had come to light. It's what happened lately when Tom Kitt negotiated a derogation from a directive obliging employers to keep employees informed of changes which affected them.
As Fintan O'Toole wrote here on Tuesday, one of our leading sceptics, Sile de Valera, is often absent from ministerial meetings, leaving decisions to be taken by the faceless bureaucrats about whom she and others complain.
Faceless bureaucrats, however, are only one of the sceptics' bugbears. You may have noticed how McCreevy and O Cuiv in particular refer to "the establishment" and to some "ruling elite" as the authors of decisions to which they object.
As if McCreevy were not at the very heart of the establishment and O Cuiv were not the grandson of one of the founders of Fianna Fail. I suppose it's all of a piece in a party whose leaders manage to convey an impression that they're permanently in opposition and therefore not to be held responsible for anything.
It's on a par with our national habit of talking about the European Union as if it was a body of which Ireland was only a poor relation.
On one point I found myself in agreement with Mary Harney's article which appeared in yesterday's Irish Times. The young Sinn Fein supporter who told the Questions and Answers audience on Monday that he'd burn and stamp on a European flag bore a chilling resemblance to the boy soprano in Cabaret - the one in his Hitler Youth uniform who sang Tomorrow Belongs to Me.