As a member of a family that recently upgraded their car from a 93D to a 98D, I feel obliged to point something out to the German ambassador, writes Breda O'Brien. The car blocking the entrance to the concert hall is not ours.
Remarkable, is it not, how fussed we get when someone departs from the language of diplomacy and tells the truth as he sees it? Herr Pauls's attempts to clarify what he actually said were funnier than the version originally reported. Somewhat earnestly, he explains that he never used the word "coarse" in relation to Irish society. Instead, he explains that the question being posed in Irish society is whether prosperity had made us rougher and less caring.
In similar vein, he explains that he never said that Irish junior ministers can earn more than the German chancellor. Instead, he said that secretaries general in the Irish civil service can earn more than the German chancellor. Well, that really helps.
And as for our history being sadder than Poland's, normally that kind of comment goes down very well. The most oppressed people ever, and all that.
What the 200,000 or more Poles resident in Ireland (at least according to the Minister for Integration) make of his comment would probably be interesting reading, too.
Speaking of integration, the ambassador also bemoaned the fact that European countries learn absolutely nothing from each other when it comes to integrating immigrants. He said that when newcomers cluster in areas with cheaper rents, ghettoisation results, with schools experiencing immense difficulties because up to 70 per cent of the pupils can be foreign nationals with poor language skills. Balbriggan, anyone?
Ambassador Pauls has been accused of being both rude and tactless. Yet is it so hard to imagine an Irish ambassador welcoming a group of Irish business people to Germany and, for example, briefing them on how the German economy soared with the help of Turkish gastarbeiter (guest workers) but how many Germans were somewhat aghast when so many Turkish people wished to stay in the country? Until the 1990s, the German idea of integration was still heavily influenced by blut und boden (blood and soil). People born elsewhere but of German descent could live as citizens in Germany, but Turkish people who had been there for two generations could not expect the same for their children.
Still, Germany has declared itself a country of immigration, and is making efforts to come to terms with the need for integration. And ambassador Pauls did say he did not suggest Germany was a model for anything.
Perhaps our new-found wealth has made us over-sensitive. In Ireland, we tend to teeter between extremes, between ill-founded nostalgia for the past and brash denial that anything good in Ireland existed before the Celtic Tiger.
In the depressed 1980s our largest single export was young people. Anyone who thinks that was better than Ireland in the new millennium needs his or her head examined. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that a country can adjust to extraordinary changes without significant difficulty is equally wrong.
Naturally, people are often less worried by criticism from within. In an interview in the Daily Telegraphlast Saturday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, identified certain characteristics of British society that he is deeply worried about. One of them is the relentless desire for fame, the "gladiatorial streak in the entertainment business where increasingly humiliation is the way forward". He also worried about children leading "crowded lives" where there is no space for them to develop at their own pace. He had as little time for the "claustrophobia of gang culture" as he had for the "claustrophobia of intense achievement in middle-class areas".
The culture increasingly rewards business success and fame, and not unnaturally it breeds alienation among those who have least chance of achieving either.
He thinks Britain is "in a mess about multiculturalism" and that while people should be free to follow different religions, schools should teach children about the influence of Christianity in their country.
As ambassador Pauls may have glumly noted, the archbishop's remarks did not excite too much comment, either because it was an Anglican archbishop making them or because he had the good sense to make them about his own country.
The archbishop's remarks remain valid, and sadly, many of the ambassador's comments about Ireland remain valid, too.
Perhaps the most interesting and scary aspect of the 20th and 21st centuries is the fact that so many of our problems are magnified by the technology we are completely dependent on.
For example, the "gladiatorial culture" that the archbishop finds so distasteful was fuelled by the insatiable demands of round-the-clock television.
The ambassador could have been much harder on us. The '06 and '07 cars that he teased us about are a result not just of a rapid rise in prosperity, but of our love affair with cheap fossil fuels. As a nation, we remain in denial about the two-headed monster bearing down on us - peak oil and climate change.
For example, in much of the commentary about the Greens' first 100 days in office, it was pointed out how difficult it will be to sell to the electorate initiatives such as carbon tax or other measures that will require any level of sacrifice.
The only dispute about peak oil - that is the time when more than 50 per cent of the world's oil will already have been extracted - is about when it will happen.
There is now virtual consensus among the scientific community on climate change.
Nathaniel Branden is not a writer with whom I always agree, but he was correct when he said that human beings have a wonderful propensity to look at a problem, decide what the best course of action is and then do exactly the opposite. That would appear to apply to our attitude to the problems facing the planet. We know that our lifestyles are not only wasteful, but stressful, and in many cases are negatively affecting our health, but we hum and haw.
Perhaps the ambassador should have thrown in a reference to our attitude to climate change. Then we could have worked up some righteous indignation about that, too. It seems to suit us better than actually tackling the problems identified.