On Thursday the Government published its wording for the second referendum on Nice, writes Dick Walsh.
The Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, current president of the Council of Ministers, had already said that history would be unforgiving if the European Union missed the opportunity to reunite a continent divided by the Cold War.
And the leaders of the major parties in this State, calling for a Yes vote in the October referendum, had no doubt that the opportunity, when it came to ratifying the Treaty of Nice, fell to Ireland.
But preparing the ground for the referendum is not the only political high point in a period fizzing with political events, if not popular excitement.
On Monday, publication of the so-called benchmarking report will mark the start of a new and intense phase of bargaining on the pay of more than 250,000 workers in the public service.
Related accounts of the cost of living, the returns of the Revenue Commissioners and the state of the public finances have been published, leaked or obtained with the help of one of the most enlightened measures to have been passed by the Oireachtas, the Freedom of Information Act.
And, lest we grow too smug reading accounts of corporate fraud in the United States, the report of our own long-delayed investigations into the activities of Ansbacher account-holders and related affairs will be published next week - not on Tuesday, as promised, but on Thursday.
The picture is incomplete, but we may yet find ourselves in a position to assert the primacy of politics over the encroaching claims of commerce and debate the state of the nation with more information than usual to hand.
But not just yet. The Dáil has gone into recess and won't be back until September for a preliminary (four-day) canter over the referendum course, although it may spend a day in the week after next on the 10,000-page Ansbacher report.
In the meantime, I hope the latest reports from corporate America have softened the coughs of those whose mission in life is to whinge for Ireland - or, at any rate, for something they call Ireland Inc.
One of them invaded the corner of a bar I was in of late. And, boy, did he have a lot to whinge about, ranging from the time and space which the media devoted to politics to the supposed political preferences of anyone who'd ever come within an ass's roar of RTÉ.
POLITICS, it seemed, was less worthy of attention - less relevant to our daily lives - than football. And someone, maybe a small cabal, maybe the whole damned lot in RTÉ, had decided to foist a version of politics on the rest of the population - at their expense.
To make matters worse, the RTÉ message was cleverly designed to keep those who delivered it in jobs and their managers in control. All at the expense of the taxpayers, in defiance of the Government and in pursuit of a conspiracy, the aims of which only time would tell.
In the meantime, the public would have politics rammed down their throats morning, noon and night; half of the country's businesses would be taken under State control and the other half bankrupted.
All of which your man at the corner of the bar had on the best authority, so I took it that he'd been reading the O'Reilly papers, listening to Today FM or overdosing on some of the more lurid contributions to the Forum on Broadcasting.
Why the public hearings of the Forum on Broadcasting had to be crammed into one day beats me. But then it probably followed a pattern designed by whoever decided that the forum should not discuss funding but should report within six months.
These are the people who decide that the most appropriate people to report on broadcasting are accountants, probably in line with the notion of the country as a whole being forced to fit the description Ireland Inc.
It was ironical that the idea that we hear too much about politics was repeated in a week in which it was all but impossible to exaggerate the national, European or global importance not only of politics, but of openness in decision-making.
The general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, David Begg, in an interview with George Lee - in a series of which Charlie McCreevy's was the opening contribution - made a simple but vitally important point about politics the other day.
He recalled how, while working for Concern, what struck him when he stepped down from a plane in Kigali airport was the smell of poverty. Now he believes the best way to help the 1,500 million people around the world who live on less than a dollar a day is by political action.
The G8 leaders met in the Rockies, a safe distance from the opponents of globalisation and a world away from the stench of poverty. David Begg, like the opponents of globalisation, had said: "The solutions to these problems are political solutions. We can generate wealth. It's the distribution that counts . . ."
The response of the most powerful men in the world in their Canadian fortress favoured the destruction of Russia's nuclear weapons over the relief of Africa's starving millions. It was summarised by Brigid Kendall of the BBC: "They've chosen security, not poverty, as their top priority."
In Ireland, too, we have "decisions to make about the kind of country we want". Ireland had had "fairly good results" over 15 years. Now, there were problems in health, housing and public services generally.
Begg believes this is still a generous society, but it's up to us to confront the issues of caring and social cohesion.
I'm waiting for the proponents of Ireland Inc to turn responsible, to ignore the evidence of corporate misgovernment and fraud - as well as McCreevy's squanderlust - and demand that the rest of us pay for their extravagance.