Riveting as the passing of the Late Late Show has been, there have been other programmes on television in recent days. Different, but arguably as important in shaping our understanding of world affairs and Ireland's response to them.
RTE deserves our thanks for screening, over three nights this week, The Death of Yugoslavia. Made originally for the BBC, this remarkable series takes us back to the political roots of the problems which today face the Western community in Kosovo. It combines the excitement of a tautly plotted thriller with the human grief and devastation which have become so dreadfully familiar on our screens in recent weeks.
The Death of Yugoslavia was made in the wake of the 1995 Dayton Accord, when the participants must have felt free to speak. The programmes include long and extraordinarily frank interviews with all the main players - President Milosevic, the Presidents of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, as well as their top generals, advisers, international diplomats and fixers. The sufferings of ordinary people and the atrocities they endured are not neglected.
The series tells stories of political treachery and extraordinary heroism (the Serb representative who voted against Belgrade's military intervention in Croatia; the local police chief who went out alone and unarmed, night after night, to try to persuade Serb vigilantes to dismantle roadblocks. He was finally murdered, taking, in his widow's words, "sixteen bullets"), of ethnic hatreds and loyalties that crossed all divides.
The series does not make overt judgments, but allows the main participants to speak for themselves. For example, what emerges with terrifying clarity from the second programme is the gross ignorance and complacency with which the political leaders of the European Union dealt with the unfolding tragedy in the Balkans. This included an early attempt to double-cross Milosevic, by bribing Montenegro to vote for secession from the Yugoslav federation - something the Serb leader had already made clear he would not tolerate. But the series is telling, too, on Milosevic's ruthless methods.
A notorious Serb paramilitary leader, responsible for the deaths of several thousand Muslims in the Bosnian town of Zvornik, says, smiling slightly: "Milosevic didn't give us orders - just requests. `We need your fighters in this town or that.' We didn't let him down."
How does Ireland stand in the present situation? Our forces have played an honourable role as peacekeepers in Bosnia, but we have not distinguished ourselves in our political response to events in Kosovo. "We're between a rock and a hard place on this one" was how David Andrews answered, when asked to comment on the NATO bombings.
Earlier this year the State signed up to an EU statement which described the NATO intervention as "necessary and warranted", while at the same time insisting that this comment in no way breached our traditional neutrality. This is not only dishonest but politically inept.
We are moving rapidly into a situation where such exercises in fence-sitting will no longer be possible. We cannot plead ignorance as an excuse this time, as we did for the Holocaust. Programmes like The Death of Yugoslavia ensure that we know too much for comfort. And they remind us that members of the European Union have a duty to try to influence that organisation's policies in a way that has not always been the case in the past.
Last week the Government published Ireland and the Partnership for Peace: An Explanatory Guide. This puts the arguments for joining what is described as "a voluntary and co-operative framework for regional security co-operation between NATO and individual non-members of NATO".
In theory, this is meant to be one of the key issues of next month's European elections. The Government has decided that, despite Fianna Fail's election pledge to hold a referendum, this is not necessary because (in the Taoiseach's words) "a clear democratic mandate will emerge from the European poll".
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Government is desperate to avoid a public debate on the issue, because it fears the association in the voters' minds with NATO's debacle in the present conflict and the scenes of misery from the refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia. This betrays, not for the first time, a contempt for the electorate which is quite inappropriate.
There is an appetite for a much broader discussion of what role Ireland should play in shaping and implementing a common security policy in Europe. An opinion poll conducted recently for this newspaper showed that 71 per cent of voters want a referendum on PfP. Last month a number of public figures, including Bishop Willie Walsh of Killaloe and Seamus Heaney, signed a petition calling for such a poll.
The arguments for and against membership have been well rehearsed in this newspaper. Those against argue that any link with NATO would compromise our traditional policy of neutrality and would ally us to a military organisation over whose decisions we would have no influence. Those in favour of joining PfP point to the membership of other neutral countries, like Austria and Switzerland. Leading members of the Defence Forces say that our failure to join means that our honourable role as a peacekeeping force for the UN has been sidelined to some extent.
It is clear that whatever decision we make about joining Partnership for Peace will be of the utmost importance to the way we see ourselves and to our future role in the European Union. As such, it is important that it be allowed the maximum public debate, rather than leaving the impression that it has somehow been smuggled through in the EU elections.
We are moving towards a European Union very different from the small and homogenous group we joined a quarter of a century ago. Enlargement means that the Union could consist of 25, perhaps even 30, states in the near future. On Monday, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, a former president of the commission, was in Dublin to give the first Brian Lenihan Memorial Lecture to the Institute of European Affairs.
He spoke extremely warmly of Ireland as a "dependable enthusiast" for greater European integration, and said he believed this was not simply a matter of money, but of political belief. But if we are to fulfil this role with equal enthusiasm in the future, we need to know what it will involve in terms of a common foreign and security policy. A proper public debate demands a referendum. Let the people decide!