Marry the damned woman and put an end to it, I murmured to myself last week (there being absolutely nothing else going on in my life at the time). But of course when Charles marries Camilla it will put an end to nothing, writes Kevin Myers.
We are doomed for ever to read about The Royal Family - and I use the definite article and the capitals intentionally: who else are we referring to when we say those words, "the queen"? They are the First Citizens of the worldwide royal republic of Popular Culture, celebrity in which is usually fleeting, save for members of the House of Windsor, its only permanent participants.
I would not gamble the deeds of my house on the names of the monarchs of Belgium or Norway, never mind of their consorts, but there is not a Polish polisher, Norwegian Lap or Sicilian Vespa who doesn't know who Charles and Camilla are. The British royal family is unique: in the global imagination, it is The Royal Family.
Yet to the British, the Windsors are also the caste from whose loins emerge the heads of state: single kingship helped provide a mythic glue which bound the people of Britain to a (largely) single sense of identity. Even republican Britons feel they belong to a larger self which was created by that mythology of monarchy. They are non-subscribing participants in the ceremonies of identity, agnostics in the back of the Church.
What is the equivalent to this binding mythology in Ireland? While I was travelling on the Luas last week - with, naturally, a friendly brown bag over my head - various place-names in mellifluous Irish were being intoned by the poor woman they keep chained in some iron-dungeon in the tram's bowels, no doubt occasionally tossing her some nourishing Gaelic gruel, cruibeens, and dulse. Then there within my brown ku klux sak, it came to me: notional Irish is to the identity of the people of the Republic what the House of Windsor is to Britain.
Both projects are absurdly expensive and utterly socially dysfunctional. The royal family is the apex of, and the inspiration for, an absurdly restrictive class system. Obligatory Irish does something similar, at massive cost placing an insufferable educational handicap on the social classes at the bottom of the heap.
Moreover, the political classes of both societies have made the consensual decision that the expenditure on these national myths is justified, no matter the price in social injustice. How many patients are in hospital corridors, or illiterates signing on the dole, because of the treasures squandered on national myths instead of hospital wards or education in sink-estates? The many vast palaces from Balmoral to Windsor, and the comparably expensive fantasy that we are just a hair's breadth - or even a hare's breath - away from being an Irish-speaking nation, are deemed intrinsic cornerstones to national unity, almost beyond discussion.
And as in Britain, there are many Irish people who, not subscribing to the national myth, sit mouthing non-liturgically in the back of the national church.
So my repeated little plaints in this column about the absurdity of the bogus Irishry everywhere in Luas, and my endless gibes at the expense of Eddie O'Keeffe, Minister for the Gaeltacht and Anything Misty, Insular or Ancient - why, these are the equivalent of an English republican anti-royalist diatribe in The New Statesman.
I might enjoy writing them - and certainly more than you do reading them - but they are as effective in changing language policy as a vote in Laois County Council is on the oceanic majesty of El Nino.
So, that being the case, we should probably accept Eddie's next proposals that only cattle that moo and sheep that baa and goats that butt in Irish are entitled to headage payments. Soon he will declare that Irish computers may only compute in Irish, and our rivers may only babble in Gaelic, and we'll be sending off our laptops and the Liffey to Gweedore, there to fall in love for the first time and lose their virginities in an e-mail turf-shed.
When they come back home, they are forever on the phone, cooing in Irish to their loved ones - an Apple-Mac from Armagh, or a comely brook that is usually a tributary of the Boyne. Telephone bills mount, parental patience runs short, tempers run short, fights begin, the Liffey overflows its banks in a vast sulk, as the laptop hacks into the Pentagon and starts a nuclear war.
Yet again, vast expenditure on Irish, and to such little effect; for when the floods subside and the nuclear winter ends, no more people are speaking Irish than they were before. The Liffey has reverted to English, and the PC is so talking "Friends".
We are establishing an official state-identity by putting our money where our mouth clearly isn't.
And in the absence of the binding tribalism created by monarchies, maybe all republics behave similarly - the French, for example, have fetishised the French revolution, so that their largely unchallenged national project is the unattainable trinity of freedom, equality and brotherhood.
Meanwhile, in the back of their church, a handful of silent royalists are inwardly reciting the tridentine mass.
The Swiss, the Italians, the Germans: they too probably nurture nation-making projects, of which I know nothing.
The Irish language is the equivalent of the House of Windsor, which makes Eddie O'Keeffe what he has known he was all along: keeper of the national flame. He is our very own Prince Charles, on his shaggy Connemara polo pony.