There are good reasons why French, and not German, is the vernacular of the diplomatic world. German has many admirable qualities, but it is not a soothing language, writes Frank McNally.
It does not naturally lend itself to diplomacy - which, in the words of one cynic, "is the art of saying 'nice doggy' while searching for a rock".
Undiplomatic to start with, the perils of German can be further exacerbated by mistranslation. No doubt you remember the Ems Telegram. But in case your Leaving Cert history is befogged, I'll remind you.
It was July 1870 and France had already forced Prussia to back down on supporting a Hohenzollern candidate for the vacant Spanish throne. Not content with that victory, however, the French dispatched an envoy to the spa resort of Bad Ems, where King Wilhelm was taking the waters, and demanded that he forswear his cousin's Spanish ambitions in perpetuity.
The king was irked by this badgering and refused the request, albeit softening his rebuff with diplomatic niceties. Unfortunately, he allowed Bismarck to issue the press release on the incident, which had been relayed to Berlin by telegram. The Iron Chancellor saw an opportunity to walk the French into a war that he wanted even more than they did, while making them look like the aggressors.
Without actually rewriting the telegram, he edited out the niceties. The effect was exactly as he calculated. When the news reached Paris, crowds took to the streets shouting: "To Berlin!" France duly declared war and, six weeks later, surrendered in humiliation.
I realise that the Franco-Prussian crisis of 1870 is far removed from the German ambassador's recent address to businessmen in Clontarf; and the people of Berlin can rest assured that, Gay Mitchell's anger notwithstanding, war is unlikely. The Irish and are far too busy earning the price of 07 BMWs to march anywhere (besides which, in terms of socio-economic models, "To Boston!" is our preferred direction).
But Ambassador Pauls should have known that, when he took the waters at Dollymount, he was issuing his own version of the Ems telegram. The risk that it might lose something in translation - irony, for example - must have been obvious.
In the reported version, he appears to have told us the truth about ourselves; and as a career diplomat, this can surely not have been his intention.
In fact, he said little that Emily O'Reilly or Archbishop Brady or our other moral leaders haven't said already. With a few amendments, it could even have been a Fine Gael election broadcast, complaining that we had misused our new-found wealth. But it was just a lot more shocking to hear it in a German accent.
Speaking of Bad Ems, it was particularly risky of Mr Pauls to remind us about the doctors who described €200,000 salaries as "Mickey Mouse money". Those are atrocious Ems, right enough, and have been the cause of much indignation here. But suggesting that we have lost the run of ourselves is our job. The job of visiting diplomats is to flatter us, as convincingly as possible.
A former Mexican ambassador had the right idea when, at the end of his Irish posting in 2004, he bade a fond farewell in an article in this newspaper. Agustín Basave had, I think, been genuinely taken with the country, God love him. He was not consciously soft-soaping. But he succeeded admirably, even so.
Tripping lightly over Ireland's economic transformation and associated excesses, Mr Basave spoke instead of us having "the greatest per capita literary GNP in the world" - a prescient metaphor, given the recent revelation that Central Bank staff have been active in writing the Wikipedia entries of Irish poets.
Then, apologising in advance for the simplification, he described his idea of the collective Irish persona: ". . .a tall, skinny, hardy silhouette. It seemed to reflect a gutsy figure that reached high but was looking at the ground. In its eyes, below an ample forehead, I saw a smiling melancholy.
"Somehow I perceive it as the product of a tyranny of politeness, with a sociable, expressive demeanour designed to hide emotional inexpressiveness, like some sort of an easy-going stoic. A good-hearted persona that was raised with toughness but, far from resenting it, decided to take life lightly and feel happy. Wealth has recently softened things, but the essence seems to remain. . ." Mr Basave's image reminded me of Yeats's personification of Ireland as a fisherman: "The freckled man who goes/ To a grey place on a hill/ In grey Connemara clothes/ At dawn to cast his flies". And it was reassuring to know that a foreign diplomat still saw such qualities in us, even in an era when our quintessential fisherman was less likely to be casting flies in Connemara than to be the owner of a vast factory-ship moored off Africa.
In similarly poetic vein, and tellingly in light of the Clontarf controversy, the Mexican ambassador saw Ireland as a country where "the language has flourished to avoid hurting anyone, while the word, by winding around to escape a head-on collision against reality, has left a trace of beauty". This was another prescient metaphor, and I think it describes the dilemma in which Ambassador Pauls now finds himself as he tries to carry on his work here.
There are conflicting claims about what exactly happened in Clontarf, and perhaps more eye-witnesses will emerge. But it seems clear that, by talking about us in German, rather than one of the romantic languages, Mr Pauls has been responsible for a head-on collision between Ireland and reality. It remains to be seen whether he can claim diplomatic immunity.