This week I was going to write a different column. It was about the terrible length of time it can take to make a country a bit better, and how quickly it can be destroyed.
This time the post mortems were on Ian Bailey himself. The death of the chief suspect in the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier had enabled the people of Ireland to engage once more with the murder case that has obsessed us for decades with this new development, which for Bailey has probably been a good career move.
The late controversial music critic George Byrne was in Detroit, Michigan, for a U2 gig with some other rock critics when a taxi driver noticed their accents and asked them where they were coming from. “Ireland,” they said.
A few weeks ago here, I pointed out that an RTÉ1 This Week feature on Nikki Haley as a potential danger to Donald Trump in the Republican primaries was all very interesting, but basically a waste of time. That political journalists may love talking about the Iowa caucus and all that stuff, the way normal people talk about the build-up to Cheltenham – but that their addiction to the process has blinded them to the fact that the game has fundamentally changed.