`When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions." This is how their world must appear to Ministers today as they prepare for an awkward EU summit in Nice and at home try to come to grips with the turbulence which has suddenly undermined the culture of contentment.
There's a daunting list of issues to be faced at home and abroad. It extends from Egypt's ban on beef imports currently worth £200 million a year to possible changes in the EU's voting rules on taxation - a threat to our low corporate tax regime which foreign investors find so attractive.
At home, the only hint of relief for the Coalition has come from meetings of the social partners, who have been considering the future of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness and, as I write, seem committed to its survival.
But the soothing noises that suggest the rising tide of discontent is confined to the public sector are belied by the strike of taxi-drivers, often considered the most voluble of the self-employed; by a strike at Tara Mines which threatens the jobs of 600 workers but has had little publicity; and by the risk of industrial action at Ulster Bank.
Of course workers in the public sector - teachers, nurses, railwaymen - not only bear the brunt of demands for restrictions on public spending and lower taxes, they (and not the Government) are the first to be criticised when their services fall short of the standards the public feels it should have.
And here are two other reasons for discontent: teachers generally, and secondary teachers in particular, feel they are on their way down in the world. Where they were once respected in their communities and fairly well paid, they are now regularly criticised and unable to afford even a modest house.
At the other end of the wage scale in the public service, railwaymen and local authority workers have never been well paid but have often shown extraordinary loyalty to their employers and the public, only to be left with pitifully small pensions and given scant courtesy when they retire.
The crux for the Government is that so many of its troubles are linked. There's the coincidence of expectations raised in advance of the Budget and the dire warning issued by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) on Thursday.
"There is no soft option," said the ESRI. "The contribution to inflation from domestic sources is on the rise and we are very exposed over the euro, over which we have no control. Competitiveness can really suffer and, in the worst case, we could see a very rapid slowdown and possible recession."
As the Irish Independent screeched in its front-page headline, we are "Up to our eyes in debt to pay the price of houses". But the numbers of homeless are increasing; so are the local authority housing lists. As for the list of millionaire builders, see the property pages and social columns.
Egypt doesn't want European beef because of the incidence of BSE; and we have been lackadaisical, to put it mildly, in our attitudes to animal health and disease eradication in the past.
Governments and right-wing economists insist that low corporate taxes are essential to the attraction of foreign investment. Ministers are prepared to fight tooth and nail in the councils of the EU to preserve the regime and, of course, the imbalance that goes with it.
If, unlike most EU states, we want to maintain low corporate tax rates we have to make up for it by taking more from the PAYE sector. And if we want to keep the good times going for the high rollers, we must spend less than other EU states on health and welfare.
We have the deregulators who believe they have the answer to all our problems - except that, no sooner has deregulation been announced than they set their minds to regulation.
So the deregulation of taxis is immediately followed by second thoughts: what we really need, some say, is deregulation of the business but regulation of the service.
And others, like Willie O'Dea, are convinced that, while deregulation might be good for Dublin, it's not what the rest of the country needs.
The taxi-drivers themselves could give lessons in second thoughts. Many had always seemed to personify capitalism at street level: the most aggressive proponents of the system you'd be likely to run into on a day's outing.
If you wanted to find a relentless critic of the unions and a good friend of Bertie Ahern, a one-time admirer of Charlie Haughey and the way he pulled the system, all you had to do was call a cab.
You'd soon find yourself well versed in the ways of Travellers and immigrants, culchies and gays, indeed anybody who could be identified as "one of them": wasters, chancers, intruders on the lives of solid citizens like ourselves.
If, for the sake of argument, you were to plead that neither immigrants nor Travellers, neither culchies nor gays, could be blamed for the way they were, you'd get a smirk and a snort of disbelief.
That was up to, well, about a fortnight ago. Now, I'm looking forward to hearing about culchies like Bobby Molloy who, when the going got tough, flew off to Mexico to see in a fella called Vicente Fox. Who is somewhere to the right of Molloy himself.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie