OPINION: Enda Kilroy wrote to our letters page the other day to complain that "some of the most unsavoury journalism I've read in recent days has come from two columnists in your paper" - yours truly and Kevin Myers, both of us having written about the United Nations.
I thought "unsavoury" was a rather good choice of word. For many people, it's just poor taste to criticise the UN, no matter how many genocides they fail to prevent or how much oil-for-food dough they siphon off or how many Congolese children they rape.
The genocide and the fraud and the child sex isn't unsavoury, but using it to besmirch the grand ideals of the UN is. A couple of years ago, I got an irate e-mail from a Canadian reader announcing he was cancelling his subscription to the paper because "criticising the UN is going too far". And I was a lot softer on the UN back then.
This isn't ideological on my part. If I'm standing at the water's edge, whether on the beach at Phuket or the docks at Dún Laoghaire, and a huge wave destroys my home, my family and my livelihood, I'm not going to be picky about who shows up to help out.
But, invariably, the first folks to show up are the Americans, the Australians and the British. The others will get there eventually.
The French sent 100 firefighters to Meulaboh to set up a field hospital, but 15 days after the tsunami only 25 per cent of their supplies had been delivered because they only have one helicopter, a Dauphin borrowed from Aerospatiale and designed to shuttle executives hither and yon, not ferry in relief supplies.
Don't take my word for it. It was all on the news sur le continent, the French TV crew arriving to film their country's heroic relief workers in action only to find they had no relief work and no action except the installation of the facility's latrine.
What about the Irish? Well, as RTÉ reported, "the Government announced that a technical team, including an Army logistics expert, will travel to the region on Friday to assess needs". That's Friday, as in January 7th, as in two weeks after the tsunami hit.
There seem to be an awful lot of people "assessing" needs, rather than supplying them. If there's a point to keeping Jan Egeland, the UN's humanitarian honcho, and a huge staff in prime New York office space as a permanent global humanitarian bureaucracy, it should surely be to maintain elementary co-ordination structures to ensure that hundreds of French relief workers don't have to sit around an empty field hospital twiddling their thumbs and admiring the new latrine while waiting for the next celebrity needs assessor to show up.
Even Enda Kilroy could make no more impressive claim of Kofi Annan than that he is "conspicuously present in Asia assessing the situation". The battered coastal populations sent out an SOS, not an assess-O-S, but that's the only service the UN moral preeners seem able to provide.
Would you let these guys run anything closer to home? Would you patronise a pub managed by the UN? "Two weeks after the beer ran out at O'Malley's Bar, UN Breweries spokesman Jan Egeland announced that the Secretary General had appointed a Beverage Supply Co-ordinator who would be flying in to assess the situation and co-ordinate talks on long-term imbibing needs."
UN sentimentalists, for whom the two magic initials always conjure some misty Austin Powers-era UNESCO cultural gala with the late Audrey Hepburn and Sir Peter Ustinov surrounded by smiling children of many lands, are the ones over-invested in ideology.
For them, institutional transnationalism is the new communism: its spectacular failures on the ground can never trump its theoretical perfection in cloud-cuckoo land.
Alas, the rest of the world is moving on.
Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister, put it very well a couple of years ago: "Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator," he told the Australian Press Club.
"Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented if they are to serve the interests of the international community, including Australia. We are prepared to join coalitions of the willing that can bring focus and purpose to addressing the urgent security and other challenges we face."
"Results-oriented": not a lot of that in the UN approach to the tsunami, or to Sudan, Bosnia or anywhere else.
In fairness to the UN, its no-can-do attitude is a time-honoured tradition. Though its Security Council structure remains formally the second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, its philosophy owes more to the Cold War and the decades it spent paralysed between two mutually obstructive veto-wielding blocs.
Whatever its defects, the do-nothingness of the UN reflected the reality of the global stand-off. The problem now is that its squalid inertia is no longer a reflection of cold, hard-power reality but a denial of it.
Away from Kofi and co, the world is moving broadly in the right direction: entire regions that were once wall-to-wall tyrannies are now home to fledgling democracies - Eastern Europe, Latin America, Afghanistan and soon Iraq - no thanks to the UN.
But in Kofi's corridors of power nothing's changed: the UN resists reform and enables, as Canadian columnist George Jonas put it, "dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight".
Last spring, summer, autumn and winter, Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese government's man in New York, was merely the latest thug regime's emissary to game the system, bogging down US calls for sanctions in the smoke-filled rooms of global consensus. "Let's not be hasty," Ambassador Erwa told the Los Angeles Times. Fortunately for him, not being hasty is the UN's preferred working method, whether for mass murder or tsunamis.
None of the good and useful things being done in Indonesia or Sri Lanka depend on the "conspicuous presence" of an over-promoted hack bureaucrat. They would happen anyway. Meanwhile, when the key agency, the United Nations Devastation Evaluation Reassessment Personnel Emergency Report Filing Operation Relief Mission (UNDERPERFORM), eventually shows up, the emergency will be over but it will no doubt invent some bogus "long-term" humanitarian catastrophe to justify its superfluousness.
UN fetishists should enjoy it while they can. As the Herald Sun down under reported the other day, "Mr [ John] Howard said he was determined there would be no UN involvement in Australia's massive package to Indonesia."
How awfully unsavoury of him.