A FOOLISH consistency, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds, Admired by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
De Valera seems to have liked these lines; and Brian Lenihan often mocked what he called the tyranny of consistency.
Well, this form of tyranny is not much in evidence these days, either among politicians or commentators, whether the issue is violence or tax or the use of public funds.
On violence, Gerry Adams and his friends are not only the most blatantly inconsistent but the most brazenly hypocritical of the politicians.
They say they have no control over the IRA, yet they use it as a lever to support their demands and as a threat against anyone who dares to resist them.
When one of their own activists is killed, they complain of a shoot to kill policy being operated by the British security forces.
And when an IRA store is discovered, with enough explosives to blow a whole town to pieces, they cannot find it in their hearts to condemn it - though the lives at risk are those of people Mr Adams says he has nothing against.
That doesn't matter: if they die, they die and the British government is to blame.
Believers in the cause do not ask for explanations. The rest fit into places ordained by history: the Republic as the Provos' supporters' club; the unionists as lantern jawed puppets of the British.
The message is repetitious, endless and circular. It's not meant to be understood, let alone to appeal to the people with whom, in the end, Mr Adams and his followers must live.
JOHN Humphrys's interview with Mr Adams on Radio 4 the other day was like a man wrestling with an anaconda. A lot of flailing and threshing about, but no clear outcome, no answers.
If the British government has, indeed, authorised a shoot to kill policy, then it too has hypocritically stooped to paramilitary levels while preaching a more civilised approach.
But while some offer political excuses for their inconsistency, others have only the TV ratings to explain attitudes towards the proponents of violence if not towards violence itself - that border on the bizarre.
What are we to make of last week's Late Late Show which featured Mr Adams as a local hero of sorts - straight from some Belfast version of Coronation Street?
This was the so called armed struggle as show business, complete with a fawning Gay Byrne, Christy Moore as court jester and an audience in which only one member seemed to have held her head and escaped the epidemic of amnesia.
Here was the man lately chosen as the most unpopular political leader in Northern Ireland (in an Irish Times poll) and no one bothered to ask him why or what he hoped to do about it.
No one noted that he alone - in a group that included Ian Paisley and David Trimble - won almost no cross community support. Or that only John Hume and David Ervine of the PUP satisfied majorities on both sides.
No one wondered what impression all of this must make on those in the North who are suspicious of the Republic's attitudes and intentions, however Dick Spring and John Bruton try to reassure them.
Inconsistency doesn't seem to worry the great minds lately turned to recent reports on welfare fraud and underpaid or uncollected taxes.
These reports needed to be handled with care. And those on tax were indeed treated with the deference due to the middle classes even when they're up to no good.
So there was scarcely a ripple when it emerged that Chris Flood, a Fianna Fail TD, held one fifth of the shares in the company which headed the list of defaulters with £350,000 underpaid and penalties totalling £270,000.
The report on welfare, on the otherhand, provoked such a torrent of resentment that poor Willie O'Dea, also of FF, thought he was onto something when he heard of a ministerial directive on repayments. It was, he said, a verbal directive so framed that someone who had defrauded the taxpayer of £40,000 would take 400 years to pay it back.
Alas poor Willie. The directive was written, not verbal, and not recent but three years old. Issued, not by Proinsias De Rossa, but as a humane gesture by Michael Woods.
But the Willie factor is potent and widespread, as the anti welfare lobby stirs the greedy pot. It was a point made here last week in a piece that upset Michael McDowell and Charlie McCreevy.
Michael took umbrage in the Sunday Independent, a paper which seems to take its politics from him and some of its journalistic habits from the Daily Mail.
Its main story last weekend was about the possibility that Albert Reynolds would replace Boutros Boutros Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations.
I know the Chinese don't want an English speaker in the job. But to think that Albert might be some kind of halfway house... There's the Sunday Independent for you.
Anyway, there too was Michael, the spitting image of a hired gun called in to defend the indefensible and bamboozle the locals at the district court in Ennistymon.
Of course some of the locals are bound to be impressed. Why not? Here's a man who sounds as though he's just shared a platform on the Corn Laws with Michael Portillo.
Get real, he barks. And in the hush that follows there's a whisper: "Jasus, don't he have great English."
Get real. It's easier said than done. How can anyone who hasn't been over the course - Gonzaga, UCD, King's Inns join him and his few friends in the real world?
As for me, I've never been auditor of the Law Society or passed within an ass's roar of the Law Library. And if Michael is still on the election committee, I suppose I can kiss goodbye to my chances of joining the Kildare Street and University Club.
Which means that, as Michael sees it, I'm not really qualified to write about social welfare, let alone to comment on the Sunday Independent's rush to judgment at the first whiff of fraud.
MICHAEL, of course, has a BA (Hons) in politics economics, so that's all right. He doesn't need to get real, he's certified. His word, as a rule, is final.
I know I shouldn't, but I still have a niggling doubt or two. Why the outrage at the proposal by Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds of a minimum income?
Economists are no longer the high and holy men they used to be. Some even those. of the Doheny and Nesbitt school - have been known to tailor their arguments to suit themselves or their clients (like lawyers).
And some who are considered leaders, out there in the real world, manage to face in different directions at once.
Take Tony O'Reilly, who likes to recall how he advised his friends Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe against the evils of economic nationalism.
He practices what he preaches too. Except that, here, the voice of the Independent Group is loudest among those demanding the State's protection against the incursions of Rupert Murdoch's News International.
Michael, I'm sure, won't mind the doctor's lapse, remembering how he himself once favoured residential property tax. Remembering Emerson: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." {CORRECTION} 96091900128