One thing for certain is that we shall never know the full death toll of the St Stephen's Day tsunami. With equal certainty, we can say that that one victim that the catastrophe should have claimed will be leering back at us in the future, an unkillable vampire that ceaselessly stalks the world, regardless of how often the rising sun of revelation catches it away from its catafalque, or how frequently the wooden stake of reality is driven through its heart writes Kevin Myers.
No matter its egregious blunders, its vast corruption, its staggering ineptitude, its ghastly sanctimony and its blustering pomposity, the UN will survive its failures in the Pacific as it has survived all its failures everywhere.
The UN has such a powerful place in the Irish popular imagination that it is almost above criticism. In a way, this is understandable. It provided the forum in which this State was able to make its first international mark in the world, and it was in the service of the UN that the Army learnt to respect itself. The ambush in Niemba in which so many brave soldiers died had a profoundly unifying influence on Irish life. Even more important to the morale of the Army was its victorious assault on The Tunnel in Katanga, a military achievement that required a professionalism and a gallantry for untried forces against veterans which even now seem quite extraordinary. It is rightly a matter of considerable pride for the Army.
But that was then, and this is now. So go on. Wait for the UN to authorise serious action to prevent the genocide in the Sudan; and in the meantime watch as the polar ice-caps melt. We have already watched as the UN impotently and wretchedly presided over the massacre at Srebenice, the consequences of which we are living with today - for to the lively Islamic imagination, the failure to protect the Muslims of Bosnia was the responsibility of "the West": that is, the Americans.
It was of course the Americans - not the wretches of the UN - who ended the war in Bosnia. It was also the Americans who saved the Muslims of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing by Serb fascists. Wherever the US was not involved and the UN was - the Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia - there were massacres and ceaseless war, even as armies of UN officials with their sunglasses and their four-by-fours sipped sundowners on their hotel terraces. If UN personnel were deployed in Stillorgan in midwinter, they'd still have their Ray-Bans and their Land Cruisers.
The greatest single UN mission since the Congo in 1960 has been Iraq, over the past 15 years. For the first decade, the US allowed the UN to handle affairs, and the result was calamity. During an unprecedented orgy of misgovernance and corruption, UN officials helped rape a country and its people, even as they bolstered the internal power of a genocidal tyrant.
The cost of that festival of corruption is literally uncountable. Perhaps as much as $20 billion went missing during the oil-for-food scandal, much of it into the pockets of UN officials, and many thousands of Iraqis perished because of the manipulation of sanctions by Saddam and his UN cronies.
Now this wouldn't matter all that much if we in Ireland hadn't raised the UN into being a secular religion, possessed of some strangely divine moral authority: a Catholic church without the dog-collars. Uncritical Irish UNophilia is now so entrenched that we have created the extraordinary triple-lock to the use of our armed forces aboard. We require the authorisation of the UN before a single soldier steps onto a single Hercules - albeit a foreign one, being too mean to buy any ourselves - to protect either or own national interest, or to help enforce a moral order we believe to be right.
You don't ever triple-lock a fire-axe, even if the locks are well-oiled and well-made. Yet we have tied the deployment of the Defence Forces to the rusting, corrupt and corroded lock of the UN, as if it were some guarantor of moral perfection. Still, if Rwanda, Iraq, Bosnia are your idea of the international community working in harmony, then clearly the UN is the organisation for you.
To wish for the consent of the UN is to seek the good opinion of an otiose, indolent, corrupt and morally inert slug. The UN has appointed the regime of Muammar Gadafy - which among many other tasty delicacies was behind the Lockerbie bombing - to be the defender of individual freedoms. That's right: Libya now holds the chair of the UN commission of human rights. So don't be all that surprised if, next, Sudan chairs a UN commission on multicultural tolerance, and Zimbabwe is responsible for guarding minority rights. Ah, and here comes Burma, no doubt soon to be UN champion of open and transparent government.
Still, the UN could still be expected to come into its own after a natural disaster, surely? Quite the reverse. After the tsunami, Kofi Annan couldn't be found. No doubt he was still unwrapping his Christmas presents from Libya and Sudan, as the US, the Australians and the Japanese spontaneously stepped into the breach. Meanwhile, from the UN headquarters in New York came the buzz-saw sound of snoring.
For the UN mixes sanctimony with theft, humbug with greed, and all spiced with a hefty dollop of sloth. Look up - and the Airbus boring holes in the ozone layer overhead is laden with UN officials flying first class to the Seychelles to discuss global warming.