It was, in the words of Mary O'Rourke, "political correctness gone wrong". People getting upset about nothing, seeing insults where none were intended.
They had to be going around, desperately seeking insult, so they could wallow in a warm bath of victimhood and self-pity. Why can't they just grow up and stop being so bloody sensitive?
People like Fred Nwajei - a Nigerian quoted in Saturday's Irish Times (about Mary O'Rourke's comment that her supporters had "worked like blacks") as saying that it made him feel "downgraded and segregated" - need to get a life.
Cut to: interior, Dáil Éireann, April 28th 1994, debate on the second stage of the Irish Horseracing Industry Bill. The former minister for agriculture, Austin Deasy, is on his feet. He is an angry man. He is angry about racism. Not against black people, though. Not even against Irish people. What really gets to him is racism against Irish horses: "I wish to comment on a practice which I find revolting - it does not refer to anybody here - that is the racist manner in which BBC and ITV commentators refer to animals with an Irish name running in England.
The way they deal with the names of such horses is extraordinarily derogatory and deliberately degrading. In the languages department within the BBC all presenters, newscasters and interviewers who have a problem with a language pronunciation are coached on the pronunciation phonetically . . . They make no attempt to get the name right. It is a deliberate slur on the Irish. This is a matter that should have been taken up by the Government, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht."
Cut to: interior, Dáil Éireann, October 18th 1979, debate on the second stage of the Fisheries Bill. Austin Deasy, the defender of Irish horses against racial slurs, is on his feet. He is worried about the lack of co-ordination in the fight against river pollution. "There could be 10 or 12 urban councils and six or seven county councils on that river system. Most of those could be doing their job, but there might be a few niggers in the woodpile who would destroy the whole purpose of the legislation."
Cut to: interior, Dáil Éireann, December 15th 1966, adjournment debate. Martin Corry, the veteran Fianna Fáil deputy, is on his feet. He loves the word "nigger". He has used it again and again in Dáil debates. He is not alone: the word has been used at least 40 times in the Dáil, and only one or two of the references were in complaints against racism. In 1932, for example, the former minister Patrick McGilligan took the opportunity of a debate on the Oath of Allegiance to regale the House with a "story of two niggers discussing the sale of a mule".
Corry is continually enraged when foodstuffs are imported into Ireland, having been bought from "niggers". No one ever objects to his use of the term.
The nearest he has come to a rebuke was in 1951, when he tackled the minister for agriculture, James Dillon, about the importation of barley from Iraq at prices higher than those paid on the Irish market and demanded that the minister "give to the Irish farmer the price that he paid the nigger last year".
Dillon rebukes him, but his objection seems to be that the word should not be applied to people from the Middle East: "It is a woeful thing to hear in this House the children of Cleopatra described as 'niggers'."
Now, and for the first time ever, someone actually objects up-front to the word itself.
Brendan Corish: I do not think he should be allowed to describe people who are not of the same colour as people in this country as "niggers".
An Leas-Cheann Comhairle (Cormac Breslin): "Niggers" is not a disorderly word.
We have a long history of two things. One is an extreme sensitivity to perceived slurs on the Irish. The other is an extreme insensitivity to perceived slurs on everyone else.
So when Austin Deasy heard a BBC racing commentator refer to a horse called "An Buachallán Buidhe" as the "Buckalawn Buddy", he was convinced that the error arose not from the fact that Brough Scott, or whoever it was, had not paid attention in his Gaelic classes, but from a deliberate campaign of denigrating our nation: "God help anybody who gives an attractive Irish name to a horse that is sold in England, as that horse will be maligned - it is not the horse that will be maligned, but the Irish race. It is deliberate insult and the commentators seem to go out of their way to do so."
But he was in all likelihood genuinely unaware that there might be any problem with the phrase "niggers in the woodpile" and, I imagine, would have been utterly perplexed by any complaints.
So, yes, the controversy over Mary O'Rourke's comment had a large element of silliness, and yes, we should have more serious things to worry about. But isn't there something healthy about getting a dose of your own medicine?