It may not have been widely noted, but Tuesday was a remarkable day in the politics of these islands: the day on which that old imperial warhorse, the Daily Telegraph, heaped praise on an Irish Minister - and a Fianna Failer at that.
Only very old republicans will remember "The Man From The Morning Post", a ballad mocking the paper's representative in Ireland during the War of Independence. The Telegraph is the Post's more sympathetic successor.
And this is how it describes Charlie McCreevy: "The fact that he enjoys a pint of Guinness and is divorced . . . has not prevented the Co Kildare man, who long opposed the tainted former Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey, from being seen as a future prime minister."
The reason is plain. McCreevy is "the Celtic Margaret Thatcher: abrasive, rightwing and the man who has delivered the most successful economy in Europe". It's "one of the showcases of the benefits of EU membership."
But the Celtic Thatcher ran into trouble, first with the European Commission, then with the European Central Bank and finally with McCreevy's colleagues in the European council of economic and finance ministers.
Which made him a hero of the Eurosceptic right: anyone who'd fallen foul of so many Europeans couldn't be all bad.
The Telegraph, on the Conservatives' Euro-sceptic wing, had found an ally at the heart of what used to be called the republican party. An unlikely ally, but clearly committed to the cause.
The commitment was mutual: "Our sympathy is with Mr McCreevy," the Tele- graph declared. "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the other finance ministers resent the tax levels in the British Isles and that, in the case of Ireland, their resentment is seasoned by irritation at what they see as the bumptiousness of a country that has been a heavy net recipient of EU structural funds.
`In any case, right or wrong, Mr McCreevy is answerable to his electorate, his fellow finance ministers are not . . . This unpleasant bullying is a timely warning of what might happen to us if we, too, were to join the euro."
McCreevy is not as keen as his British allies to emphasise the government's disagreement with the rest of the EU on taxation. He says that if anybody suggests reducing the amount being given to old age pensioners or taking £500 million from the health services, they're mistaken.
It sounds good. But the warnings, at home and abroad, from the International Monetary Fund to the Economic and Social Research Institute, have not been about the health services but against tax cuts, especially at the top rates; and Bertie Ahern's toughest fight in the EU - at the Nice summit - was against raising corporation taxes.
The Ahern-Harney-McCreevy line on what the Telegraph calls "unpleasant bullying" is that this State needs to hold taxes down if it's to attract US investment and if the Commission and Council are wise, they'll allow other small states to follow suit.
Given the choice between Boston and Berlin, Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats have chosen Boston. And if that means settling in with new allies, so be it. They can take the tide of Euro-scepticism at the flood.
It's a dangerous manoeuvre, as Fine Gael and Labour have been pointing out. But, then, Fine Gael and Labour have European allies among the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Fianna Fail's closest allies may soon be the EU's opponents in Britain.
But as Fine Gael moves - however tentatively - to the left and a choice between centre-right and centre-left coalitions at the next election seems possible, we may be finding our European feet.
Our attitudes to the EU and to domestic politics may become both more coherent and more consistent, as the division between the American and the European ways of running our affairs helps to define parties and their competing policies.
There is always the difficulty of making sense of policies that defy definition. It's less than a year since Charlie McCreevy, in the course of a lecture on left-wing pinkos, advised the public to take what money was on offer and go out and enjoy it.
Spend, spend, spend was his message. Now, he seems to find it odd that young people have lost the habit of saving.
Next, I suppose, he'll be wondering how the Stardust generation lost its belief in justice. And how those who watched elderly relatives in miserable nursing homes lost their belief in the administration of health and welfare in this state.
The paper by Prof Kathleen Lynch I referred to last week is available from the Equality Studies Centre, UCD. It's called "Realising Change: Structural and Ideological Considerations".