Oops, they did it again. Just when it seemed possible to start ignoring that silly old dinosaur of a "competition", Miss World, up comes Rosanna Davison in an English newspaper, fists flailing at the small-minded begrudgery of the Irish, writes Kathy Sheridan.
And there was I, thinking that she and the organisation had escaped rather lightly in fact, in the month since her coronation.
Official Ireland had thrown down the red carpet for her. Receptions at the airport, the Mansion House, the Áras; soft, indulgent interviews on flagship shows that never sought to crack open old family tragedies, nor drag up the toe-curling Channel 4 documentary on Julia Morley's organisation and its inexplicably stupid decision to locate the 2002 extravaganza in Nigeria.
On Beauty Queens and Bloodshed various gorgeous Misses, holed up in a luxury Nigerian hotel for a fortnight, complained about getting fat from eating chocolate, while outside people were being murdered in the streets and a 21-year-old Nigerian journalist was literally fleeing for her life (for her ill-judged hypothesis in defence of their witless cause). And all of it crowned by allegations from Miss Australia that Morley was extracting money from developing countries with a ruthlessness that would be the envy of any multinational.
But Unofficial Ireland was happy enough to play along with the official line. Many saw a lovely, well-spoken, world-beating Irishwoman in Rosanna Davison, and were proud. Some yelled "fix!" because the grassy knoll kooks will always be with us (and sometimes they're right). But most were benignly indifferent because, really, whoever gave sufficient credence to this "competition" to care whether she became the favourite because of her father's connections or because - as Davison was assured by a Miss World employee - she came tops in the swimwear section? Anyone panting to have a snide lash at her or the event had all the material they required in an Observer report the day after her win: "Julia Morley, executive chairman of Miss World and one of the 11 judges, said it was Davison's answer to her question in the final stage of the competition that won it for her. Asked to describe her life and character in 30 seconds, Davison said she was a 'warm, fun-loving person', who values loyalty, integrity and honesty."
You have to wonder what bestial practices the losers came up with in their answers to hurl them down the rankings.
Yet all this passed without comment at the time, because Davison was only 19 after all, seemed like a grand girl who meant no harm, and could hardly be blamed for the fact that the competition was beyond parody.
So, for a girl who grew up with a father so disillusioned by this country and its negativity that he stopped working here many years ago, she must have been feeling blessed.
Well, the pay-off for the Irish interviewers and their tread-softly approach was the all-barrels exposé in the Daily Mail, incorporating not merely the assault on the disposition of the ghastly natives but on a 19-year-old "temporary nanny", who had a brief fling with Davison's father 10 years ago, while her mother was laid up with a broken neck.
"We trusted Maresa and she was employed to look after us children. Dad said himself he didn't know what he saw in her - but she disgusts me."
Ours not to judge where the burden of trust and disgust should lie in such intimate matters, of course, although any parent of a 19-year-old ensnared with a married man 25 years her senior would probably have a determined stab.
And the pay-off for the Daily Mail? Suggestions from the Miss World organisation that Davison had been misquoted, taken out of context, words put in her naïve mouth (although she's the same age as Maresa was then) - the classic blame-the-media strategy, in short. Until the paper retorted that she had startled the interviewer by laying into the nanny quite unprompted and it had the tapes.
It's oddly reminiscent of the reaction of another (Irish) representative of the Miss World organisation during the Nigerian spree: "It was all because of that big-mouthed journalist who should have known better," said this doughty defender of the Morley ethos, about the 21-year-old reporter who had been sacked, seen her paper burnt down, and was running from certain death. According to Channel 4 in October, she was still on the run, isolated and terrified, somewhere in Africa.
No one comes out of this fiasco looking good, except perhaps the maligned nanny, who by all accounts has suffered grievously for her lapse. The money on offer for her story was probably enough to tempt a saint, let alone a student in a summer job.
Yet for all her youth, she kept her silence and sought obscurity.
How long she remains there will be the measure of her friends. One tabloid is asking people to ring in and say where she is now.
Sure what's another year, another Miss World, another distressed woman on the run?