For Drapier the high point of this week, and indeed of the year so far, was the ceremony at Messines on Wednesday last to honour the Irishmen who died in the first World War. It was long overdue, but when it did come to pass it was done well and done with dignity and feeling by a President who grows in stature all the time.
The RTE journalist Margaret Ward put it well on Wednesday when she said on Morning Ireland that theirs was a story we were not told about in our history classes or in our history books. As far as the 50,000 Irishmen who died in the first World War are concerned it is as if we suffered from a national amnesia which lasted the best part of the century.
These men, like the parliamentary party of John Redmond and John Dillon, were airbrushed out of the official version of modern Irish history, as ruthlessly as any dissident in Stalin's Russia, and it is only recently that we have even begun to recognise their existence and to make amends to their memory.
In passing, Drapier wants to pay tribute to his old friend, Paddy Harte, who along with Glen Barr did so much to make Wednesday's ceremony possible and stirred memories that for too long lay dormant.
We live in an age of reconciliation, and that in itself is a blessed thing. We have seen Tony Blair apologise for Britain's role in the Great Famine, Bishop Comiskey apologise for what happened at Fethard-on-Sea, the Christian Brothers apologise for the deviants of their past. And much more. It is good to bring these matters into the open and good to recognise and face up to the wrongs and slights of the past.
This week, as a parliamentarian, Drapier wants to recognise another group, long obscured, frequently reviled but most of all written out of the history of official Ireland whose time has come for recognition. Drapier refers of course to the old Irish Party, swept away at the foundation of the State and dismissed subsequently as either a historical aberration or an awkward footnote.
Drapier is on strong ground when he says the enduring strength of our parliamentary institutions owes as much to the legacy of that party of Parnell, Redmond and Dillon as it does to the founding fathers, if not more. It was the Irish Party which taught the ordinary people the rules and practices of democracy, created a powerful parliamentary instrument and showed how parliament could work and how elections should be fought, to the extent that when the State was founded it already was a mature parliamentary democracy.
The fate of the Irish Party was the fate of history's losers. Their achievements were denigrated, their motives and character impugned: most of all they were treated as if they had never existed. In the 1920s and the 1930s we had the sad spectacle of some surviving former MPs living and dying in penury, some in squalid rooms in London, one living like a tramp under Battersea Bridge, and others eking out a miserable existence, forgotten and ignored.
They had their champions. James Dillon from his first day in the Dail pleaded with the parties of old Sinn Fein to give some small support to men who had given decades of unpaid parliamentary service to their country. Alfie Byrne was another such voice. Gen Sean McEoin and Sean MacEntee each in his own way came to recognise, in the words of Sean McEoin, that they and Sinn Fein had "blackguarded these men" and blackened their names and that recompense should be made.
It never was, and Drapier makes no excuses this week for drawing to the attention of his colleagues the historic debt all of us who serve in a sovereign Irish parliament owe to the memory of these men. Only the bust of Parnell on its quiet shelf in the Leinster House ante-room marks their existence in a national parliament, the achieving of which was their life's work every bit as much as it was the work of old Sinn Fein.
Both Eamon de Valera and W.T. Cosgrave came in time to respect and value the contributions of the Irish Party. Each in his own way came to recognise and respect that there was a nobility, a great decency, a patriotism in many of these men, a selflessness few today could even imagine.
Tom Kettle with his "dream born in a herdsman's shed" was the most eloquent of these MPs. He, along with Willie Redmond, made the supreme sacrifice, leading where they urged others to follow. All in all, these men were patriots as well as great parliamentarians. Surely now is the time for a sovereign independent Irish parliament to apologise for the way we have ignored them and disregarded their legacy. It is time to make some small amends.
On the more mundane front, Char- lie McCreevy may have won the battle and lost the war this week as far as the farmers are concerned.
Drapier enjoyed Charlie's broadside last Sunday. It was vintage McCreevy stuff, and much of it was true. Many urban deputies wished they had said it and some are probably repeating Charlie's words with relish and approval in the privacy of cumann meetings.
The problem, however, is not that Charlie was over the top - he usually is - but that farmers have long memories. The urbanites will applaud Charlie's words and just as quickly forget them. The rural punters, however, will feel that Charlie kicked them when they were down, that he made them look foolish in front of their urban relatives.
It will take more than Dermot Ahern's patchwork exercise to undo the damage, and Charlie can be sure that Opposition deputies from farming areas will give wide circulation to his words on a regular basis between now and the next election. Just like the "dirty dozen," Charlie's phrases have a habit of sticking. Sometimes being dull is politically safer.
So while it may have been magnificent, it was bad politics. Farmers and their families vote. And they remember, especially if they feel they have been insulted or slighted. Ask any rural Fianna Fail TD or senator and you won't have long to wait for the answer.
Also this week we had Tom Gildea.
The only surprise is that anyone was surprised when Tom announced his continuing support for the Government. Tom's opposition to the Government hasn't been particularly spectacular up to now, and most of us in here assumed he was with the Government for the duration.
Still, it is no harm to hear him say it again, and with a hungry Fianna Fail machine lined up in South West Donegal to take his seat back, Tom clearly is in no hurry for an election. Why should he be?
Finally this week Drapier was delighted to see Theresa Ahearn back in action. Theresa has had a rough time, but thank God she appears to have come through it with flying colours. She was in splendid form in the debate on mental handicap on Wednesday night and was warmly welcomed by colleagues from all parties.