Noel Doran of the Irish News told Vincent Browne on RTE the other night of an article being published next day on the privatisation of Belfast International Airport.
A select committee of the House of Commons was investigating, as well it might: the airport had been bought by a consortium of management and staff for £32.75 million and sold two years later for almost £107 million.
Aha, said Mr Doran, chuckling at the good of it, here was a sign of the times: Northern Ireland was about to switch to normal politics - and turning out to be no better than the Republic.
The committee, as the saying goes, couldn't agree more. One of its members said the deal "stinks from start to finish". The North's environment minister, Lord Dubs, thought the way it had been handled was scandalous. Outrageous, said the committee, in its report published on Thursday: the purchasers of the airport had been able to sell it "at immense profit" but "without any obligation to return some of that profit to the taxpayer".
Last week, I wrote here about the Assembly election as the last in which the national question - unity or union? - would be the dominant issue.
What a relief it would be when the Assembly faced such mundane problems as health, welfare, education and agriculture. In Noel Doran's view, financial scandals should be added to the list.
He wasn't the only Northern journalist or politician who'd been keeping an eye on us.
Several contributors to current affairs programmes on BBC, UTV and Radio Ulster have spoken of our troubles of late. This makes an interesting change in the way in which the Republic is seen from above. Even when light began to be shed on the corners where business and politics meet, the North paid little attention to our sordid affairs.
Considering the attention we paid - or pretended to pay - to the North, if only under cover of the national question, this was remarkable.
But unionists, who might have been expected to take a dim view of southern deviousness in financial affairs, preferred to concentrate on symbolism - the constitutional claim - or on obvious signs of clerical influence.
Nationalists, who might have felt embarrassed by the shenanigans in Dublin, either accepted Charles Haughey's word that scandal marked the Republic's coming of age (in the world of macho economics) or chose to ignore it altogether.
Both sides paid more attention than they deserved to the Supreme Court's nonsensical description of the constitutional claim as an imperative and Mr Haughey's bombast about the North as a failed political entity.
The irony is that Mr Haughey's successors have shown that accepting the status of Northern Ireland and the principle of consent is not just convenient rhetoric; it's an honourable commitment, overwhelmingly endorsed by the electorate in a famous referendum.
As for clerical influence: while it persists in health and education as it has done for more than 150 years, though in a somewhat modified form, there's now a small but growing body of priests and nuns who want to contribute to the community - and democratic debate - not to control it.
If the speed of change in Northern Ireland has taken many by surprise, including those who'd been saying for years that change was long overdue, I think we may modestly claim that developments in the Republic were a help.
At any rate, the dreaded South finally ceased to be a hindrance, the bogeyman blocking progress. People in Northern Ireland began to take note of the less dramatic, but still important, changes that were taking place here.
As they did so, several excuses for refusing to budge from the trenches, unionist or nationalist, lost their force.
Of course, the shift to politics and partnership was overdue. It has taken 30 years to escape sectarian division and the campaign of violence which Cahal Daly once described as a "disproportionate response" to fear and grievance.
But the suddenness of change is best appreciated by recalling how things stood, seven months ago, when interparty discussions adjourned for Christmas in a mood close to despair.
There followed the murder of Billy Wright in the Maze prison, a round of reprisals reminiscent of the 1970s and serious threats to negotiations almost as soon as they'd begun in earnest.
Between April and June, the Belfast Agreement, referendums, North and South, and this week's elections have set a dizzy pace which will not slacken when the assembly meets to begin its work in a few days' time.
As I write, it looks as if the pro-agreement members will outnumber the opponents of agreement by a majority of three-to-one; and commentators are talking about winners and losers, as if this were another election and what mattered were the spoils of office.
This suits those parties which prefer the certainty of old divisions to the risks of new arrangements between the people of these islands and, in particular, the communities in Northern Ireland.
But the opinion polls which indicated the results now being discussed also showed that a clear majority of people in the North believe the agreement and the Assembly should be made to work.
Other evidence from the polls suggests that people want more - much more - than the Punch and Judy show, as John Alderdice likes to call the sectarian batting in the political tent.
Indeed, it looks as if Alliance is about to be rewarded for years of patience and perseverance; when the Assembly gets down to business the party will be there in force, in the middle of the middle ground.
No doubt in the new beginning mediators will still be needed - even as the North, led by David Trimble, John Hume and the parties of the centre, moves into an age of partnership.
But if politics is to take the radical step towards a left-right realignment, for which some young voters are hoping, then the lead will be taken by those impressive negotiators who represented the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party in the multiparty discussions.
I have a feeling that, with the agreement, the referendum and Assembly elections under their belts, David Ervine, Billy Hutchinson, Gary McMichael and their colleagues will feel up to the challenge.
Their emergence - and that of the Women's Coalition - has been one of the most enlivening features of Northern politics in the 1990s.