Was it really necessary for Bertie Ahern to take his entire Cabinet to Armagh on Monday for the inaugural meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council? Talk about rubbing the unionists' noses in it. Did nobody in the Department of Foreign Affairs stop to think about how that awesome cavalcade of ministerial Mercs would look on television?
Someone in this office said it reminded him of a Mafia funeral. My own impression was of the leaders of an invading army arriving to dictate surrender terms to the defeated enemy. The scene was shown a number of times on BBC Northern Ireland, where viewers will have drawn their own, almost certainly tribal, conclusions.
There was a fine colour photograph of the first meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council on the front page of Tuesday's Irish Times. If you look very hard you can just about see David Trimble and Reg Empey right at the back.
I'm told that the two other UUP ministers were also seated around the long table but, even with the help of a magnifying glass, I couldn't recognise them. What the picture did show was that the unionists were comprehensively outnumbered (some might say outgunned) by the combined representatives of the pan-nationalist front.
Between the Republic's Cabinet Ministers, the SDLP and Sinn Fein, the various shades of green came to 21, compared with four unionists. The symbolism will not be lost on the Rev Ian Paisley or other anti-Agreement unionists, some of them in Mr Trimble's own party.
There was a consensus in the media that the meeting went well, at least when compared with previous attempts at setting up similar cross-Border co-operation. It was remarked that there were no protests, as happened in the past.
David Trimble behaved with considerable grace under pressure. Even at the press conference, when his clipped Ulster tones were completely overwhelmed by the mellifluous rhetoric of the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste and Seamus Mallon, he managed to hold his own without being discourteous.
The Ulster Unionist Party leader should not have been put in this defensive position. It would have been more tactful, to put it mildly, to have had the Taoiseach and Mr Trimble handling the press conference on their own, an arrangement which would have projected parity of esteem rather than the visible discrepancy in political numbers.
Both communities in Northern Ireland are watching the early days of the new political order like hawks. Any sign of triumphalism or of Ministers favouring one side over the other will be carefully noted. In this context, the symbolism of each carefully staged "historic" occasion is important.
David Trimble's hope is that the first meeting of the British-Irish Council in London tomorrow will provide unionists with an "enormously significant" day of the kind which nationalists enjoyed on Monday. But it is unlikely to resonate with the same emotion, if only because those who take part in it will not carry the shared tragic history of 30 years of violence.
It is wonderful that these structures are being set up and that, on the eve of a new millennium, we are witnessing such rapid progress towards a durable peace. But, at the risk of sounding an unfashionably cautious note, it is also important to remember that we are not quite there yet.
It isn't just that decommissioning hasn't gone away. Many members of the unionist community, even those who want the Belfast Agreement to work, are unhappy about the terms which David Trimble has had to accept. They believe that in agreeing to set up the Executive prior to any handover of weapons, he has been forced to bend the knee to the forces of Irish nationalism, including the Provisional IRA.
Even within his own Assembly party, whose members have a vested interest in the survival of the new political structures, there are those who disapprove of Trimble's strategy. Others are quite openly waiting for him to fail. The Ulster Unionist Party leader and those close to him know that this phase of the peace process is strictly conditional. It provides a space to demonstrate that the new Executive can work for the benefit of both communities, that neither side need feel its identity or loyalties are threatened.
In the early days of the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement, a leading Protestant churchman said to me: "We've been invited to the ball and it is right that we should go. The problem for our folk is that all that we can see on offer is Irish music and Irish dancing."
His folk are unlikely to have been made to feel more at ease by the images that appeared on television on Monday, yet there were obvious ways that the ceremonies in Armagh could have helped to mollify the suspicions that still exist.
It is a great pity, for example, that the organisers did not take a leaf out of the book used by Nigel Dodds and Peter Robinson and offer a gesture of recognition to the victims of the conflict.
One of the most powerful elements of David Trimble's speech to the Ulster Unionist Council was his reference to people, like Robert Bradford's widow, who have suffered dreadful personal loss and still support a peace process which offers the hope of reconciliation between the two communities.
If the Government does not understand the need for public discretion in these early months, then perhaps some pressure should be put on it by the other partners in the peace process. The new Northern Ireland Secretary has been described, often pejoratively, as the "Sultan of Spin" but there is no doubting Peter Mandelson's presentational skills and, in his early weeks in the job, his success in offering reassurance to the unionist community.
There are other problems facing this new Executive as well as the most serious one of decommissioning. People need to be shown that the implementation of the Belfast Agreement does not threaten anybody.
If we are to have more of these "historic occasions", it is important that they should be managed with more sensitivity to the needs of both communities in Northern Ireland.