It is time to dust off - yet again - that old quote from Alexei Sayle: that everything would have been okay if Hitler had invaded Poland for charity.
Over the past 10 days there has been much controversy about Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his one-man scholarship scheme for Nepalese boys. This has been sparked by a television documentary on Ó Searcaigh's work in Nepal, which has not yet been broadcast. But there is another television programme about Irish people setting out, on an entirely individual and private basis, to do good in the developing world.
A Year in Sex City was broadcast on Monday night by BBC Northern Ireland. The programme followed an Irish couple, Andrew and Róisín McCarroll, who on their retirement sold their house in Belfast to go and work in Pattaya, Thailand. The McCarrolls seemed like very nice people, and they wanted to do some good in the world. They wanted, as they put it, "to make a difference". Pattaya attracts five million male tourists a year; the sex industry is the mainstay of the town. At the end of their 12-month visit, the McCarrolls returned home much sadder but wiser people. Róisín McCarroll was honest enough to admit that when she had arrived in Thailand she thought that she had all the answers. Now she was filled with questions, and not so certain at all.
What is it with Irish people and our conviction that people in the developing world will be delighted to see us whenever we deign to turn up there with our bright ideas? We seem prepared to drop in to any impoverished culture and give it the benefit of our opinion on their social problems, as casually as if we were telling them how to floss. This freelance philanthropy, surely, is the bigger issue at the heart of the controversy about Cathal Ó Searcaigh. But it applies in a lot more cases than his.
On Tuesday this newspaper carried a rather memorable headline on the bottom of its front page: "Chad rebels consider Irish troops a hostile force". Well, blow me down.
Chad rebels obviously have not seen Riverdance. They lack the cultural insight to appreciate that Irish soldiers are completely different to soldiers from any other country. Chad rebels don't know about our 800 years of oppression, which have rendered us so much nicer than all the other people from rich European countries. They thought that our soldiers were simply another army.
And then there are all those irreproachable projects, which involve Irish people gaining financial sponsorship so that they can go out to Africa to build houses. Yes, we're needed out there. There is a severe labour shortage in Africa, as we all know. And African people just couldn't build houses properly, until we were kind enough to go out and show them how to do it.
This is quite apart from the schemes under which Irish people seek financial sponsorship so that they can go on sponsored walks in attractive parts of impoverished countries, an idea which was memorably summarised by Mary Raftery in this very column as Getting Other People To Pay For Your Summer Holidays.
The whole question of aid to poorer countries is fraught enough when it is left to the professionals - the role and behaviour of UN aid agencies in impoverished countries over the years is not a comforting spectacle. Many decent people have spent the best part of their working lives negotiating the minefield that looms when you decide to be the benefactor of another country. And it is true that the Irish, mainly as a result of our tradition of providing Catholic missionaries, have an impressive and sustained history in this complicated area.
But that's not enough for us now. Foreign aid to the developing world, like so much else in this country, has been privatised. It has gone freelance. It is unsupervised and unmonitored. Our belief in our institutions is so low, and our self-belief is so high, that we're setting off as individuals to stomp all over other societies for our own gratification.
Only children think that good intentions are enough. Real change is grindingly slow, and we have become too impatient for it. The whole charity bonanza in Ireland - from celebrity auctions to charity lunches - is now effectively part of the leisure industry, an orgy of
self- congratulation that brooks no analysis, let alone criticism.
In Ireland everything is personal. But we have to learn that some things are more effective when they are not personal, when they are run by a system with its own built-in checks and balances, when they do not rely on an individual's charm or contacts for their success. Just because we cannot build or run such systems at home does not mean that it is all right to export our rampant individualism to cultures that are just as complicated and sensitive as our own. Collective action is not as much fun as running your own project.
It is slower, and a lot less glamorous. But freelance philanthropy is a self-indulgence, and surely we have indulged ourselves enough at this stage.