World View Derek ScallyWhat would happen if a junior Government minister went on television to claim that five recent foreign ministers were informers to British intelligence?
The media would go mad, the libel suits would fly and, unless firm evidence for the allegations was produced, the junior minister would be sacked and banished to the hardest backbench of the Dáil.
Two weeks ago, Poland's deputy defence minister said on television that the majority of the country's foreign ministers since 1990 had been Soviet spies.
He produced no evidence for his outrageous claim and the foreign ministers in question are hopping mad that he remains in his job and that the government has turned a blind eye to the episode.
It's just one example of the denunciatory atmosphere hanging over Warsaw since twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski took office. The former child stars of the 1962 film The Two Who Stole The Moon won last autumn's elections by promising to eliminate what they called the uklad - a conspiratorial structure of international investors, former communists, crooked businessmen and the "lying elite" intellectuals - which, they say, stole post-communist Poland from under the noses of ordinary Poles.
It was an appealing message to those who feel they have lost out in the transformation of the last 15 years and there was little disagreement that Poland needed to root out the corruption that had brought down the last three governments.
But there is growing concern that the government's mandate to clean the house is seen by the Kaczynskis as a carte blanche to destroy their political enemies and refashion Poland as they see fit.
The world of the Kaczynski twins is a black-and-white place populated by heroes like their staunchly Catholic parents who fought in the anti-Nazi resistance and, on the other hand, traitors with secret police files that betray active or passive contact with the communist authorities.
Since taking office, the twins have set up countless investigations into the so-called uklad and have stepped up the "lustration" process of examining secret police files, purging embassies and state bodies of anyone they deem suspect.
Considering that the Kaczynskis see conspirators, spies and traitors everywhere, critics complain that the twins can drag into the net almost anyone they wish and have turned on its head the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
An inquiry into privatisation of banks in the 1990s has zeroed in on Leszek Balcerowicz, the president of the Polish National Bank.
For his supporters, Balcerowicz is the personification of the shock treatment that kick-started Polish capitalism. For his enemies, including the Kaczynskis, he helped sell off Poland on the cheap to foreign investors.
The head of the inquiry, a politician from the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice (PiS) party, has suggested that Balcerowicz accepted bribes as finance minister in the 1990s when he oversaw bank privatisations. Mr Balcerowicz has rejected the charges - and the inquiry itself - as politically-motivated intimidation and so far no proof of the charges against him has been produced.
Meanwhile, over at the Institute for National Memory, the curator of communist-era secret police files, a new "lustration" bill will create a blacklist of anyone who could be viewed from its file as a collaborator with the secret police.
Under new law, anyone on this list will be removed or banned from public office and employers will be entitled to fire blacklisted employees.
The Kaczynskis see former communists and collaborators everywhere at the heart of Polish public life and say their elimination is an unavoidable if belated step towards creating a truly functioning democracy.
But there is a dangerous irony in the staunchly anti-communist Kaczynskis basing their fervent purge on secret police files that are hopelessly incomplete and often filled with fabrications, as the twins discovered when they viewed their own files.
The Kaczynskis have an iron grip on the PiS party they founded in 2001, prompting a party official to remark recently that party policy emerges from a "black box".
That tight grip means that their weaknesses - such as foreign policy - are the government's weaknesses.
Earlier this year, Poland's eight post-communist foreign ministers attacked the government in an open letter for straining relations with EU neighbours and abandoning Poland's long-held foreign policy consensus.
In classic Kaczynski style, the criticism was not accepted or even ignored but attacked full-on by calling the ministers a "disgrace". It is probably no coincidence then that, weeks later, the same foreign ministers were accused on television of being former Soviet spies.
Months into office, the twins remain in attack mode: Jaroslaw Kaczynski says there is "no free media" in Poland yet grants exclusive government access to fundamentalist Catholic radio and television stations which mix recitations of the rosary with rants against Jews, gays and foreigners.
But the international criticism continues to build.
The foreign media grilled Jaroslaw Kaczynski on the homophobic elements in his government when he visited Brussels this week.
The Israeli embassy in Warsaw has declined to have contact with education minister Roman Giertych because he is the leader of the smallest of the three coalition partners, the populist and often anti-Semitic League of Polish Families.
Washington has made its displeasure known on the same issue.
And last week, Germany's leading government official on human rights warned of an increasing danger in Poland of Gleichschaltung - the elimination of dissent and individual opinion in public discourse.
Into this bad atmosphere steps Ireland's own Alan Dukes, invited to speak in Warsaw next Thursday on the topic "Common sense in politics".
Good luck.