IT'S a pity they blew up Nelson's Pillar. We heard the thud in The Irish Times and stepped outside to find An Lar, the heart of Dublin, softly falling into Westmoreland Street.
As the dust settled and the ragged stump came into view through the gloom which had descended on O'Connell Street, there was the pillar and it gone.
No doubt someone thought it a patriotic deed, worth the risk to life and limb. And," many who viewed the stump praised the workmanship which had brought Nelsondown while disturbing no more than a stone or two on the GPO.
Still, someone should have spared a thought for what Nelson meant to us - a people who have made an art of turning a blind eye to things we find inconvenient or awkward.
Even before Michael Lowry's resignation from Fine Gael called attention once more to standards in public life, the week had thrown up three issues that qualified as politically uncomfortable.
First, there was abortion and the fundamentalists' demand for a referendum. John O'Donoghue rushed in, supported the idea on Saturday View and tripped his leader.
It took Bertie Ahern several days and a couple of confused and confusing interviews to escape the tangled web his colleague had woven and regain his balance.
Mr O'Donoghue, you may not remember, once featured in the Sunday Independent (back page) as some kind of playboy of the western world.
No doubt, his wide and windy acres of Munster rhetoric is still appealing to those who take their law and order from the old Gay Byrne school. But he's beginning to sound more like the Shauneen Keogh of Irish politics.
The second of the week's uncomfortable issues was raised in an extraordinary report issued by the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises' Association (ISME).
This announced: "Every society has a percentage of its population who are, for a variety of reasons, social misfits."
And, in case anyone failed to get the message or its precise relevance here: "That percentage could easily be as high as 100,000 or 40 per cent of those currently unemployed."
It added that such people needed to be properly supported by the tax and welfare systems and concluded: "In effect these people are not available for work."
But some of the publicly funded schemes had already been dismissed as liable to "foster course junkies" and in any event the report calls for radical change in the support systems, since, it argues, genuine unemployment no longer exists.
IT was hardly surprising that ISME's special pleading about foreign companies poaching staff and paying high wages was all but drowned by the angry voices of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed and the Congress of Trade Unions.
The ISME has long been, regarded as the paramilitary wing of the Progressive Democrats. Both look to the economies of the Far East for inspiration.
Mary Harney's poor but happy people of the region live in societies which the employers would probably consider ideal. An ISME speaker was one of the hits of last year's PD conference.
But the report - and the interviews which followed - have raised doubts among the Progressive Democrats about the language and tactics of the employers, with their painful echoes of the 1930s.
The third uncomfortable issue of the week was raised on Tuesday night's Prime Time, a programme which suddenly sprang to life with an excerpt from a speech by Gerry Adams.
The speech was delivered to last November's closed conference of Sinn Fein/IRA at Athboy which, among other things reviewed the events of the summer and autumn.
The excerpt was hardly surprising. Mr Adams, who appeared to be replying to criticism of a lack of militancy, urged his audience: "Ask any activist in the North, did Drumcree happen by accident, and they will tell you No...'
"Three years of work on the Lower Ormeau Road, Portadown and parts of Fermanagh and Newry, Armagh and Bellaghy, and up in Derry...
Three years work went into creating that situation and fair play to the people who put that work in.
"And they are the type of scene changes that we have to focus in on, and develop, and exploit."
It was not news to the unionists and, as Mark Durkan pointed out on Prime Time, it did not to justify the behaviour of some Orangemen and their supporters.
But it made sense of one of Sir Hugh Annesley's comments at the height of the trouble about provocation on both sides. And for a southern audience, fed on hefty dollops of anti-unionist rhetoric, that may have made a difference.
The inclusion of the excerpt from his speech certainly produced an unusually angry reaction from Mr Adams and from his colleagues, Mitchel McLaughlin and Gerry O'Hara, not only on television but on Marian Finucane's Liveline.
Spokesmen were at sixes and sevens while some denied the accuracy of the report, Mr Adams himself did not appear to do so. Indeed, he confirmed, in some exasperation, that Sinn Fein had played a part in the anti-drugs campaigns in Dublin.
By what all of the SF/IRA complaints had in common was the suggestion of betrayal by RTE - echoing condemnations of John Bruton - as though the national broadcasting station, like the members of the erstwhile nationalist consensus, had an obligation to the cause.
In RTE's case, it was not just an obligation to toe the line when the line needed promotion but to turn a blind eye when the occasion demanded.
To take a broader view, that means turning a blind eye to the fact that this is a post-nationalist age just as, in Ruairi Quinn's famous description, this is a post-Catholic State.
TURNING a blind eye doesn't mean that we've been ignoring abortion or violence or unemployment but, too often, that claims about attitudes to these issues have been allowed to pass, unchallenged, into popular currency.
Leaders of the anti-abortion movement, for example, claim that everyone in this State is against abortion. But they're not.
They say the results of the 1983 referendum and the referendum on the so-called substantive issue in 1992 prove their point. But they don't.
They pretend to be able to solve the problem by changing the Constitution. That was tried and it did not work. And it does not look like working now.
Another referendum would make matters worse. It would bring us no closer to unanimity. Not only is political opinion divided on the subject, medical, moral and legal views are divided, too.
The people of this State have chosen, formally, to turn a blind eye to the reality of abortion and the clear demand for it.
And as Mr Justice Ronan Keane reminded them in the Supreme Court the other day, governments of all shades since 1992 have shirked the obligation to legislate.
But that, sooner or later, is what the politicians will have to do.