The story of De Valera and Peadar O'Donnell and the million who left keeps coming to mind.
The old revolutionary, O'Donnell, and the founder of Fianna Fail were mulling over the achievements of 30 years. Or so the story goes.
Some achievement, said Peadar. A million people have had to leave the country since you came to power, Dev.
Ah, but Peadar, said Dev, if you'd been in power it would have been no different. A million people would still have had to go.
Maybe so, said Peadar. Maybe so. But they'd have been a different million.
O'Donnell exaggerated. The crowd he wanted to be rid of could have travelled first class on the Titanic. Those who were forced out by unemployment and poverty-filled ships like the creaking Princess Maude on every tide.
The difference persists. It has grown and spread in the 30 years since Dev and Peadar had their chat. It's a striking feature of an immeasurably richer but increasingly unbalanced society.
You'll find evidence of division wherever you look: from the roaring inflation of the property market to the pole stuck through the roof of a house built for travellers.
You'll find it in the OECD report which showed that 25 per cent of Irish people are at the lowest level of literacy, 50 per cent more than in other advanced countries surveyed.
And you'll find it, if you look beyond the occasional signs of surprise at our understanding attitude to genteel crime and political corruption, while judges banish the criminal poor to crowded jails in the manner of Victorian magistrates.
We've come a long way since the days of Dev and O'Donnell. The difference which once decided who'd have to leave now applies to those who must plead to be allowed in.
The authorities spend a hell of a lot more time preventing people from settling and working in this country than they spend preventing crooks from using it as a hiding place.
Tens of thousands of non-resident bank accounts are used to shuttle hundreds of millions in fugitive funds through the system. And Charlie McCreevy mutters vaguely about legitimate investors.
There are complaints about immigrants. And John O'Donoghue, who invented zero tolerance Irish- style, jumps to attention.
Extra staff in his Department may help to speed the paperwork; for those who must wait, frustration is multiplied by a welfare system turned on its head, as if Kafka had a hand in it.
Immigrants draw welfare because they're not allowed to work. And because they don't work, every bigot in the street feels free to call them spongers.
They're a burden on the State because the State doesn't allow them not to be. If they were playing with funny money or dodging the taxman, allowances would be made.
With luck, they might be given passports and introduced to someone who'd know where they could get top dollar on their investment.
So it was hardly surprising that reports which gleefully announced a drop in the levels of crime this week, passed on, without pause for thought, to the Haughey and Bula affairs.
It was as if what Charles Haughey is alleged to have done wasn't really a crime - certainly not in the same league as being accused of stealing a loaf of bread from a supermarket.
But that may be because reports on the business pages these days seem to be divided between warnings about inflation and investigations into financial institutions of one kind or another.
Once the spotlight was on Mr McCreevy's dirty dozen - welfare cuts which he felt obliged to introduce in the interests of the taxpayer, of course.
Now, it's Mary Harney's turn. Her dirty dozen are investigations into financial institutions and company affairs; and they're not the only inquiries going on.
Some complain that the lengthening series of tribunals - Hamilton, McCracken, Flood, Moriarty - is simply a way of getting judges to do the work of politicians while feeding the fat cats in the Law Library.
Others, who recognise the need for the investigations, wonder how we have come to this, gloomily suggest that we are somehow more prone to dishonesty than others and foresee a catastrophic end to the current affairs.
We are probably no less honest than others, though a tendency to cut corners has been developed - and even encouraged - over the years.
Our politicians are unhealthily close to people involved in finance, industry and commerce, and both politicians and business people share an addiction to secrecy.
Indeed, they manage to be both secretive and knowing, well-informed and suspicious; fearful of the public and anxious to resist every attempt to shed light on their affairs.
Not only are they anxious to avoid disclosure, they seem incapable of learning the lessons which involuntary disclosure provides.
They know that depending on business for funds is a dreadful way to run a party. But they won't change.
They have Mr Justice Brian McCracken's word for it that for a senior politician to find himself in a businessman's pocket is a short cut to corruption.
But when the Government published its proposals for the establishment of a permanent standards in public office commission they turned out to be pathetic - whether cowardly or crooked we will see when they come to be debated.
Politicians are often reluctant to apply what look like moral sanctions to each other lest they find themselves in the same predicament before the season is out.
But to allow oversight as an excuse for making a false declaration - among those who are supposed to be running the bloody show - is a mockery of the electorate.
The McCracken report was a model of clarity. Someone has gone to great lengths to turn it into page after page of gobbledygook.
As for Bula and the activities of Jim Stanley: the free marketeers among us crowed at the collapse of the Soviet system and scorned any attempt to draw attention to what followed.
Now, they're complaining about the lack of regulation, the abundance of companies run by the Mafia and the absence of any serious attempt to come to grips with gangsterism.
In the case of Bula, with its much-hyped shares and expectations of sudden riches, it occurred to me that we'd heard something of this sort before, though without any suggestion whatsoever of any misbehaviour. The name Atlantic Resources comes to mind. As Matt Cooper wrote in the Sun- day Tribune at the end of May: "Atlantic was one of the most hyped and ultimately underperforming stock market companies of the 1980s. But at one time it looked set to make (Tony) O'Reilly millions . . " It didn't. He and others lost heavily on the venture. But neither the politicians nor the regulatory authorities appear to have learned anything from their misfortune.