`Unfortunately, two samples were positive. Accordingly, foot-and-mouth disease was confirmed in this flock . . .' Joe Walsh himself was moved by the announcement on Thursday morning. To his audience, in the Dail and elsewhere, it sounded as bleak as a declaration of war.
On the Cooley peninsula, where the infected sheep had already been destroyed, friends and neighbours were reduced to silence. As John Ellmore told the News at One on RTE radio: "We stopped. I stopped my car and George Morgan stopped his jeep . . . And we couldn't talk . .. I just went on and he went on . . . That's the way it is."
The terror was felt most intensely in Cooley, but foot-and-mouth disease had already laid an icy hand on the lives of many far beyond the peninsula. In hotels, factories, shops and garages. Across the State, across the Border.
Walsh's announcement had been anticipated; feared for weeks by men in boning halls and women who looked to tourism for summer work. Workers were already being turned away, managers were counting losses.
But by the weekend even those commentators who'd totted up the numbers and come to the conclusion that F and M, as they called it, would make no difference to their macro world were beginning to be alarmed.
The Dublin Stock Exchange had taken its cue from New York and Tokyo and was already jumpy.
Old hands like Sean MacConnell and Joe Murray who knew the business - and the farmers - had long been convinced the outbreak was all but inevitable. They felt it in their bones.
Suddenly, opinion leaders who follow Margaret Thatcher's line on society - they don't believe in it - were looking for allies and support. Support from the State, allies in the rest of the community.
In the Dail on Thursday and in an impressive series of radio, television and newspaper interviews, Joe Walsh thanked the public for its solidarity and sought continuing support. Joe Rea, a farmers' leader who was once the bane of trade unionists' lives, praised the solidarity of town and country.
Trevor Sargent of the Green Party supplied a note of sympathy that had been missing when he spoke of solidarity with "our neighbours across the Border". (There must have been times during the past three weeks when they imagined that an unbridgeable chasm had opened between us.)
The urge to solidarity was palpable. So was the need, expressed by Alan Dukes of Fine Gael and Mary Upton and Willie Penrose of Labour, for a sharp understanding of a problem which criss-crossed physical and political boundaries and called for skilled analysis and a resolute response.
Walsh was promised all the support he needs. As the Opposition speakers had said from the moment of the first outbreak in south Armagh, what had to be done was to act as if the problem were already here. There were a few stumbling starts. Now, the challenge needs to be faced head-on.
People who've shown - and are still willing to show - solidarity must be sure they know what's happening. They must be satisfied that everything that can be done is being done, both to get rid of the disease and to deal with risk-takers and profiteers.
Bertie Ahern's blank response when he was asked about support for workers other than farmers is not good enough. Nor is Jim McDaid's waffle about ingenuity less than 24 hours after he'd complained that tourism would be the main loser.
The will to win, to defend the interests of the community, should not deflect attention from faults and failings in the system.
Nor, for that matter, the faults and failings of those who were charged with the responsibility to run it.
OVER at Dublin Castle, the Moriarty tribunal continued to rummage in the muddy waters of Charles Haughey's and Michael Lowry's tax affairs while, before Mr Justice Flood, Pat Hanratty and Ray Burke wrestled in their own theatre of the absurd.
Samuel Beckett's plays were on show elsewhere this week. But Burke's impeccable recall of events that hadn't happened and Hanratty's attempt to unravel it would have fitted neatly into the series being shown on RTE.
It was one thing to forget what had happened, Hanratty said. But how could he remember so clearly what had not? - "That was and is (my account)," said Ray. "If I were to close my eyes, that is as I recall it, yes."
Meanwhile, back at the foot-and-mouth debate, a junior minister, Hugh Byrne, went on the radio to repeat his double insult - that the British were "the lepers of Europe".
I wonder if he ever heard of Boss Croker who, according to legend in the West, refused on his death bed to see priest or parson. His friends cajoled him. Would he not at least agree to renounce the devil? He would not. Even at death's door?
The sceptic was adamant. Were they sure he was dying, he asked. They were. In that case, said the Boss, now is not the time to make enemies.
It's a yarn that Hugh might pass on to Charlie McCreevy, now searching for allies among the European Union's economic and finance ministers.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie