How does this State compile its guest-lists? When the President is opening a pork-processing plant, does it invite the Chief Rabbi, the senior Imam, Irish Vegans Incorporated, the Dalai Lama and the leaders of the Pigs Have Souls Society? Kevin Myers writes.
Meanwhile, the board members of the Irish Pigmeat Producers Board, The Guild of Irish Pork Sausage Makers, and the Pigs' Trotters Gourmet Association gaze in vain at their sad little invitation-free doormat.
I ask, because this month saw the President attending two major historical functions. One was the National Memorial Day at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham; and the other, at Islandbridge, was to commemorate VE/VJ Day, where she was accompanied by the Army Number One Band, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, and a brace of mayors.
Now, perhaps you are vaguely aware that the author of this column has on occasion written about Irish soldiers who fought in the two world wars. Ah, such an enchanting understatement, yet again! The truth is that I suspect no journalist - living or dead - has written so much and so tiresomely on this subject as I have. So you might think - might you not? - that someone in Government, in that vast and well-paid civil service whiling away their time until their index-linked pensions kick in, would conclude that I might be an appropriate guest at such memorial events.
After all, I dare say that some readers think I actually took part in the Gallipoli landings with the Dublin Fusiliers, that I was there on the first day of the Somme with the Inniskillings, rowed briskly away from Dunkirk with my Irish Fusiliers, and was battling to the end at the Reichswald Forest with the Irish Guards. By gum, sometimes I find myself believing it too.
So, would this not merit an invitation of some kind, if even of the most modest, stand-in-the bushes and don't say-a-word variety, at State memorials for the Irish in the two world wars? Not so. No doubt The Irish Pacifist Society, The Führer Still Lives League, The Association of SS Officers in Hibernian Exile, The Irish Republican-Nazi Association and various other interested groups are invited to such functions - no doubt turning up in little brown shorts or whatever is fashionable for fascists to wear these days - but I'm not, and wasn't.
This is rather like Fine Gael organising an ardfheis and not wanting political correspondents to attend. However, accredited journalists include the soccer correspondent for the Ulan Bator Bugle, the farming editor of the Mogadishu Mercury, the wheat critic for the Akron Argus, the ice-hockey reporter for the Trinidad Tootle and - naturally - the entire sub-editorial department of the Kinshasa Chronicle. And if asked, they would probably agree that Michael Collins is a drink of some kind, and Garret a sort of attic.
But of course, no political party has a policy of not inviting those who know what's going on. Nor does any commercial organisation arrange press coverage on comparable lines. When Ryanair wants to announce its new flight from Dublin to Rome (well, Reykjavik, actually, the rest of the way by bus) it does not contact the knitting or gardening correspondents of newspapers, but informs business journalists. And if in doubt, it employs a public relations company to put together an appropriate list of people to inform.
But the State behaves rather differently. Through the 1980s and the 1990s - almost alone among journalists - I campaigned for full and official commemoration by this Republic of the Irish dead of the Great War, and this was finally granted with the construction of the round tower at Messines/Messen Memorial Park, which was opened in November 1998, 80 years after the Armistice. Well, lots of people who had had nothing whatever to do with the re-creation of a memory of our boys in the Great War were officially invited to the ceremony, but I certainly wasn't.
However, I made my own way out to Belgium, and an Army officer friend wangled me a place in the viewing stand; otherwise I would have been peering through the railings.
The omission of this column from obvious State guest-lists for memorial events to Irish soldiers is certainly not solely a Fianna Fáil thing. Ten years ago, I received a phone call at home from the press officer of the then Taoiseach, John Bruton. He asked me: How many Irishmen and women were killed in the second World War? I told him we didn't know (we still don't), but it was considerably more than most people thought. I gave him whatever information about recruitment, and Irish VC-winners, and so on before asking him why he was asking me these questions.
"Ah," he said, "the Government is having a ceremony at Islandbridge tomorrow to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the British liberation of Belsen, and the Taoiseach's giving a speech, and it would be good to get a few facts about Irish involvement in the war, that's all."
"Really? That's the first I've heard of this? Who's going to be there?"
He named various dignitaries, before concluding with the name Tom Hartley, a Sinn Féiner from Belfast.
A heartbeat of a pause. "But why have you invited him without inviting me?" The government press officer made that noise of sneering incredulity which ex-journalists sometimes adopt once they've started working with the Government, before chortling: "Why on earth would we invite you?" Why indeed?