Some unionist politicians look at this State and wish Northern Ireland, too, could enjoy the highest economic growth rate in Europe and move towards full employment.
Some in the Republic who enjoy the benefits of prosperity look to the US for example and wish our economy could be more like theirs. But if this was a big week for business and mutual backslapping, it was a bloody awful week for politics in both of these enviable republics.
The Americans wound up an election in which inconvenient votes - especially those of the black, the old and the poor - were jettisoned at will. And Bill Clinton's successor in the most powerful office in the world was chosen in a dubious decision by a partisan court.
Here, a grim procession of TDs and senators in the Guinness Storehouse advanced on Clinton as if to say: "Sorry for your trouble, sir." Liam Lawlor slipped away to join another procession down the road in the Castle yard. Here he became one of a long line of Fianna Failers to follow their erstwhile leader Charles Haughey's example.
Haughey, you may remember, claimed to have done the State some service. He then failed to demonstrate his commitment when it came to helping the tribunals with their inquiries. Haughey showed the way. Others in the party followed. Ray Burke, John Ellis, Denis Foley and now Lawlor - all were ready to help, until the time for action came. All then found it difficult to understand what they were being asked or why questions had been raised.
Lawlor is simply the most brazen of the lot. He tells the Flood tribunal he doesn't know how hundreds of thousands of pounds came to be in his bank accounts or the accounts of companies of which he is a director. And he tells the tribunal it has no right to ask. He knows it has no right because he's a member of the Oireachtas which established the tribunal.
Back in the Dail, Ned O'Keeffe still insists he can't see what the fuss is about in his case. He's a Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture. He speaks for the Government on BSE but fails to admit his own interest in meat-and-bone meal. And Bertie Ahern, who appointed Burke, Lawlor, Ellis, Foley and O'Keeffe to office goes on mumbling excuses and hiding behind legal and procedural screens.
Fianna Fail has its way of dealing with those it wishes to ignore. No one says anything very much about Haughey. Burke and Lawlor are no longer members of the party. Foley was out of the parliamentary party for a wet weekend.
Yesterday, even as Lawlor was being asked to explain the millions in his accounts, Ahern refused to agree with Ruairi Quinn and John Bruton that there should be an all-party call on him to cooperate with the tribunal. Ahern apparently cannot see that the Dail too has rights and obligations.
In the circumstances it's no wonder that, as speech after speech welcomed Clinton to Ireland, nothing was said about the way his successor was being chosen - after an electoral cock-up that would have shamed a county council and a show of contempt for democracy.
It was Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, who described the US Supreme Court with its majority of Republican judges as partisan. He told The Last Word it had imposed a phoney deadline on the count in Florida, which ensured Bush became President-elect and deepened divisions in the US.
Clinton is used to disunity and ideological opposition. Indeed, the present divisions would not have been so deep had it not been for the attacks on his private life.
He's capable of cynicism, as he showed by his use of the death penalty for electoral purposes and by the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan. But he is also capable of devoting time and thought to causes for which there is no obvious political reward.
He recognises what has to be done in Northern Ireland and by whom. The US, the UK and the Republic, he promised, would intensify their efforts to combat terrorism. It was for the Northern parties and paramilitaries to implement the Patten report on policing, to normalise security and to put weapons beyond use.
In other words, it's about summoning the courage to do what they (or their surrogates) promised in the Belfast Agreement. Few enough have had the courage, although there are exceptions such as David Trimble and David Ervine on the wider stage, and on the issue of policing, Father Denis Faul and Maurice Hayes. But are they getting the support and encouragement they ought to have from this State which is so enviable to some of their fellows? Are they hell!
dwalsh@irish-times.ie