THE NEXT time someone makes one of the two following claims, think of Albania and let the words hang there in the air. Reverberating.
The first claim is that the Irish have a special feel for the suffering people of this planet due to their own history of suffering under the brutal heel of the British oppressor and, sure, didn't they prove it when they gave more per capita to Live Aid than anyone else?
The second is that the EU is more than a commercial union that, swathed as it is in pomp, its procedures oiled by high salaries and high living, its self esteem ensured by the likes of institutes for the study of itself, offers a new vision of nationality.
That we are all Europeans now. And that we Irish have something special to contribute to this super union of nations. Because we are untainted by war waging and colonialism, the sickeningly self admiring argument goes, we are in a position to offer "moral leadership" in Europe.
The Albanians are Europeans, of course. As much so as the east Europeans, also non members of the EU, who seriously interest the EU chiefs because of their potential wealth and the size of their markets.
But Albania is as uninteresting from that perspective as Ireland would be if it hadn't been lucky enough to get into the Common Market at the beginning, and was trying to get EU membership now. Albania could have developed (for better or worse) much as we did, if it had had sane leadership. It has the same population as us. It is as poor as we were.
But as it stands, Albania has the same relationship to the fruits of European-ness as the poor of Ireland have to the fruits of being Irish. That is, they are not in receipt of them. They are quite powerless to move themselves in from the edge.
You may have noticed some pitiable details of the lifestyle of the people revealed to us by the killing, by brutal beating on an Athy housing estate, of Ms Mary Doogue. The children were fed erratically on biscuits as she sank towards her terrible death up in the bed. There was no electricity in the house.
Albania as a country is the equivalent of a stricken house where the electricity has been cut off. Its internal problems are far too overwhelming for it to formulate a cry for help. The poverty stricken households of Ireland, similarly, get along barely from day to day, never getting far enough ahead to band together and turn to us and make just demands on us.
If the powerless cannot, by definition, exert any influence on the powerful, the powerful must take the initiative. And this is what is so, embittering is the best word I can find, about the Albanian crisis. It shows up the holes and gaps in the mechanisms for translating into practical action any humanitarian impulses we or any other rich Europeans might have.
AS FAR as I can see the position is this. We know the Albanian state has fallen apart, that the people are in desperate need and that they have asked for urgent help with law enforcement so that food aid can be distributed.
These are difficult tasks but no more difficult than have been accomplished in dangerous and chaotic situations elsewhere around the globe. We know that Ireland has a voice in the provision of help. Alone we're nobody, but we are not alone: we're Europeans, not just Irish. We have a Minister among the foreign ministers of the EU. Our input is as good as anybody's when it comes to matters of common foreign and security policy.
Our sensitivity to famine and emigration has an arena where it can be made manifest - there, at the "general affairs" level of the EU. When it decides on humanitarian or peacekeeping or refugee issues, we are there, among the decision makers.
Only that there is no EU common foreign policy. There is no route between us, looking at the television and pitying what the Albanians have been reduced to, and help for Albanian people. How the individual citizen can ever affect the foreign policy of a country Is a vague enough business. How we Irish, through the EU, might bring any real help to Albania is even more obscure.
How we can act and react to the moral questions raised by our neighbours sufferings doesn't become more clear, even though we know more and more about those sufferings. The days when people were impelled by idealism to pack a rucksack and go to the Spanish Civil War are long gone. Even the impulses behind individually heroic trips to Romania or China to save abandoned babies are only occasional.
They're irrelevant, too, where as in Albania there are no courts, no police, no transport, no civil service, no entry or exit, no places of safety, though there must be thousands and thousands of children in the most parlous state. If the television cameras could only get to them and animate our compassion. Who is running what orphanages or homes there were in that trashed country and with what?
THE EU is the only immediate hope for Albania (the UN taking an even more roundabout and lethargic attitude to humanitarian intervention). Dick Spring will be at the foreign ministers meeting tomorrow where he'll meet the Albanian Prime Minister (if he is still the Prime Minister).
We should not only hope that Dick Spring and the others may arrive at a plan of action: we should make it clear that we expect it. And that we also expect to be kept informed. RTE should wait to hear what has been decided and tell us about it.
As it happens, the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee and the European Affairs Committee have a joint meeting on Wednesday. It is largely ceremonial, to receive a guest. But if it doesn't find time to address the Albanian question it will be behaving exactly as the Commons and Lords did in the 19th century, when news of desperation was brought from Ireland.
A distant, fractious people, those Irish, given to bringing troubles on to themselves. Ignore them.
It is when what we feel seems to make no difference to our rulers high above us that we stop telling anyone about our feelings. It may be, of course, that hardly anyone cares that the Albanians have been reduced to near savagery.
But perhaps some people do. And if they do, they must want to see some way in which that caring might be expressed. But the EU may be incapable of executing our most generous desires. What with member states taking unilateral action, as in Bosnia, and the quarrel between the Commission and the Ministers as to who initiates policy, and the problems there'll be in forming any policy when the Union is enlarged, there may never be a coherent EU humanitarian policy.
In which case, we should start to hammer out one of our own. Or else stop congratulating ourselves on being Europeans. Morally superior Europeans, at that.