OPINION/Dick Walsh: It's the politics, stupid. The euro debate needs to get real." These headlines over a leading article in the Guardian last weekend turned an American cliché on its head and undermined the argument that Bill Clinton sometimes used to prove that he was no weak-kneed liberal.
The occasion for the Guardian's warning was the introduction of the euro and the rash of scepticism it produced in the Daily Mail, some of its tabloid neighbours in the print and broadcast media and their allies on the wilder shores of the Tory Party.
The Mail still exercises the prerogative of the harlot through the ages with an enthusiasm that once irritated a leading politician, Stanley Baldwin, but inspired his cousin and sometime speech-writer, Rudyard Kipling, to a few of his more pungent lines.
The exercise of the power of rhetoric without the responsibility of politics has always been one of the features of populism, whether in the hands of the Rothermeres, the Berlusconis, the Murdochs or our own, home-grown populists of politics or press.
The point made by the Guardian may be applied with equal force to any or all of our anti-political contemporaries. Their scepticism derives from their objections to restraint in any shape or form; their Euroscepticism to the form of restraint which at this time and in our world is most effective.
So opposition to the State is more than matched by opposition to the EU and in particular to any function of the union which strengthens it by sharing power and developing structures which afford more protection to its citizens. Seldom has this State been in greater need of external alliances and the cohesion of communal institutions.
Rarely has the need for vision and imagination been more deeply felt. This week we celebrated the achievements of a political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had the vision to recognise how his vast country and its system of government must be changed; who had the courage to appeal both to his fellow citizens and world leaders for the means to change it.
We recognised the world's loss when its leaders failed to respond with generosity and imagination to Gorbachev's challenge. We, too, have seen how funds which finally became available to us were not used to enhance our resources, achieve greater equality in our society and build our defences against the inevitable worsening of international conditions.
Looking back, we cannot but regret the opportunities that were frittered away as if our motto had been: easy come, easy go.
During the last year or so, a government which found itself short of achievements turned to bigger and more extravagant promises which had fewer and fewer chances of success. There was no clear distinction between the ambitions of a national plan, the challenge of supplying urgently needed public services and such patently airy aspirations as that of a national sports stadium.
The result has been that we now find it difficult to distinguish between one disappointment and another, as unemployment rises, plans for road-building are shelved and the Government wrestles with estimates for stadiums we can well do without. Budgetary figures are ominous, but few seem to have the courage to analyse them or tell the public what the sudden increases in deficits really mean.
Instead, there is a return to the bad old habits derived from following the American and British lines of assessing economic performance. There are few references to continuing - and increasing - growth in differences between classes; none to the rising tides of poverty in the developing world.
As for the promises of improved standards of political behaviour, we are beginning again to shrug off the accounts which reach us from the tribunals in all but the most dramatic cases. Commentators who ought to know better act as though experienced politicians whose activities have been exposed should be left to the absolution of the electorate.
The same commentators, who are happy enough to discuss local disagreements within parties, are pleased to ignore boring policy differences between them.
And they see no reason to remind Sinn Féin spokesmen that others would be more anxious to talk to them if and when they completed decommissioning and took to explaining some of the political contradictions which allow them to befriend leading Americans and Colombian guerrillas at the same time.