On a St Patrick's Day in the 1970s one of his friends who met Frank Cluskey on a street in Paris asked what was going on at home. Liam Cosgrave and Oliver J. Flanagan were in Rome. Garret FitzGerald was in Washington, Justin Keating in Brussels; their colleagues, like the Wild Geese, were scattered across Europe.
And here was Cluskey strolling in the ChampsElysees as if he hadn't a care in the world. What was it up to, this government in exile? "Nothing at all," said Frank, "we're just trying to give the poor little country a chance." Giving this rich little country a chance to be fairer as well as more prosperous is the aim of the Programme of Prosperity and Fairness on which the unions are now voting. Their decision will determine the future of the programme and, it may be, of social partnership. But, for the current Government-in-exile, other issues reared their heads. On Monday, far away in Australia, Bertie Ahern resumed his struggle with the English language - and the difficult, dangerous issue of immigration.
The Australians appear to have ways of dealing with immigrants from which, the Taoiseach believes, we may learn. A migration Act provides for mandatory detention of "unlawful non-citizens" who are held in camps while their fate is decided.
It's a system which, despite expert opinion to the contrary, Mr Ahern described as the best integrated in the world. Which caused such a stir - and so much confusion among his supporters - that he was given two opportunities to say that the system would not be introduced here. He didn't take the opportunities, but merely repeated that the Australian system was the best in the world.
At home, his brother Noel Ahern, a TD for Dublin North West, had told TV3 News that detention for asylum-seekers was against everything for which Fianna Fail stood. And Conor Lenihan, a Fianna Fail TD for Dublin South West, complained repeatedly on Tonight With Vincent Browne that the Taoiseach's words had been misinterpreted by the media generally and The Irish Times in particular.
"Do you think he knew what he was saying?" Browne asked. "Are you not embarrassed by it?" Lenihan, who wasn't embarrassed, said he was aware of the Australian practice and claimed there were "a lot of similarities between what happens there and ourselves".
One of the other guests on the programme was a Rwandan refugee, John Tambwe, whose father was killed in the plane crash which set off the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples.
When he explained that, in spite of this, he'd been told by the Irish authorities that he wouldn't be allowed to stay here, Lenihan acknowledged that the Irish system was "not being handled properly".
Browne's question about the Taoiseach understanding refers to Ahern's often ambiguous use of language, which is capable of being interpreted in different ways by different audiences. (The "monstrosity" of Spencer Dock was a case in point.)
Now, though, John Bruton has accused him of playing on the irrational fears of xenophobes who might be persuaded to vote for Fianna Fail. Ruairi Quinn has challenged his casual assertion that Ireland's refugee application system had been criticised as too liberal by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
And Suzanne Egan, one of the authors of a comparative study of refugee law commissioned by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, said that Ireland would be out of step with most EU states if asylum-seekers were detained here.
As for the Australian system, in 1997 it was found to have breached the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - a finding the Australian government considered "totally unacceptable".
Ahern, however, had moved on by midweek to the United States where countless refugees from hunger and poverty in Ireland and at least one generation of illegal Irish migrants - or "unlawful non-citizens" - found refuge.
There, in the enlightened company of Brian Cowen, he could forget such issues as segregation in the Irish camps of the future and the questions that he and Cowen may toss about with John O'Donoghue: should women be kept in Magdalen laundries, as of old? And are the children to be confined to industrial schools? Cowen, on a charm offensive in Washington, has succeeded in appealing to the unionists as he once appealed to the nurses - by showing an exasperating indifference to their case.
The Government had encouraged David Trimble and Gerry Adams to "jump together" in the expectation that devolution would be followed by decommissioning. When it didn't happen and Peter Mandleson suspended the institutions, the Government lurched in the direction of Sinn Fein.
As John Bruton wrote in The Irish Times on Wednesday: "When the executive was suspended, the Government (a) refused to accept any responsibility for it; (b) on the record expressed understanding of the decision, and (c) off the record expressed violent anger at it."
IF Bruton's view is correct and he seems to have the right air of it - Ahern and Cowen have spent the weeks that followed suspension in a devious realignment with Sinn Fein.
This widens the gap that had begun to appear between the Coalition and the Opposition, between the Government and the unionists and between the governments in Dublin and London.
Bruton's warning about hollow claims that "the guns are silent" has to be taken seriously. Shootings by republican and loyalist paramilitaries continue; and bombs like that found this week are still being prepared.
Ahern once said the people who supported the Belfast Agreement did not vote for an armed peace. He was right. But most of the IRA's weapons are hidden in this State, and the danger of another Omagh persists.
The last thing that's needed is another round of ambiguous rhetoric by Ahern as if he were trying to mollify a cumann down the road.
Conor Lenihan was trying to mollify a different audience at a function of the Irish Association of Corporate Treasurers in Dublin last week.
"My overarching theme," he said, according to his script, "is that it would be a great shame if, as a result of the tribunals . . . and DIRT inquiries we moved . . . from a position of relative non-compliance to a culture of `over-compliance' and `over-regulation' of our economy . . .
"An over-anxiety to secure full, retrospective, documentary compliance in relation to offshore accounts based at the International Financial Services Centre is not a good signal to international investors, and dare I say it was never the intention of the PAC inquiry into this matter."
Conor Lenihan is a member of the Public Accounts Committee.