What bothered me was Trevor Sargent's smile. I don't mean his smile in general, but that particular smile of his last Wednesday evening in the aftermath of the announcement that his party would enter government with Fianna Fáil. On the front of Thursday's Irish Times, the smiling Sargent was pictured with his hands held aloft by two colleagues.
The impression was of triumph, with more than a hint of pride. He was widely quoted as saying that Wednesday was the proudest day of his life. But here it gets ethically complicated, because, in the very next breath, Sargent announced that he was honouring his promise to resign as party leader if the Greens went into government with Fianna Fáil.
If Wednesday was indeed the proudest day of Sargent's life, one feels that this was because, for the first time, the Greens had negotiated a place in government. Why, then, asks the Green Man from Mars, should the leader resign? We know the answer: because the Greens had given a hostage to fortune and needed to appease the gods.
Sargent's pledge had not simply been a technical undertaking - comparable, for example, to the Taoiseach's promise to retire from politics when he is 60. Sargent's promise was both a repudiation and a guarantee.
It represented the clearest possible rejection of the very idea of partnership with Fianna Fáil and placed the collateral of Sargent's political future on the table.
It said, in substance and effect, that the Greens would never enter government with Fianna Fáil, or that, if by some bizarre and unforeseen circumstance they did, this would be so repugnant to Sargent's principles that he would not be seen for dust. And yet, here he was, in the aftermath of a vote facilitating precisely this calamitous eventuality, smiling and calling it the proudest day of his life.
The Green Man from Mars asserted that, from his perspective, the situation might be read as suggesting that Sargent had engaged in an elaborate deception - offering his political career as reassurance to the electorate and then tokenistically resigning when the thing he had promised would never happen came to pass.
Luckily I was on hand to provide clarification on this score, explaining that, when Sargent said he would resign he was speaking to a tribe comprising people of a certain crude sentiment concerning Fianna Fáil.
These people are fond of gathering at dinner tables in south Dublin to chant incantations against the party representing close to half of the electorate, and shudder between courses at the idea that people who are not like them should be running the country. The thought of voting for Fianna Fáil, never mind sitting at the same table as Fianna Fáilers, gives these people indigestion, or so they say.
Sargent's rhetorical self-indulgence in advance of the election had been intended to relieve this indigestion. Last Wednesday night, Sargent returned to the real world. After two weeks of negotiations, he and other Green Party leaders had come to the conclusion that Fianna Fáil was more useful than The Irish Times or the south Dublin dinner party circuit.
During the coalition talks they had been reported several times as remarking how much they had got to "like" the Fianna Fáil negotiators, giving rise to fears they might be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Fianna Fáilers were not demons after all. It was said with an air of breathless shock and wonder.
The Green Party had appealed during the recent election, as throughout its history, to the tribe that dictates the moral framework of Irish politics, and to that tribe's many representatives in the media. For the umpteenth time, this strategy failed to deliver power, and, in the aftermath of the election, it seemed like the Greens were destined to be the eternal bridesmaids of Irish politics.
Then, the persuasiveness of the arithmetic wreaked its magic on the party's pseudo-principles. It was a dizzying moment, like an adolescent taking a first pint or buying a first condom. If the arithmetic had been otherwise, the Green Party might have gone on for years mouthing the same incantations about the culture of Fianna Fáil. But now, reality reared its radical head.
By any objective standard, Sargent's resignation was ridiculous and unnecessary: either he was affronted by partnership with Fianna Fáil or he was not, and judging from his smile and reported response, he was anything but.
Resignation was not a protest but a way of mollifying the formerly benign gods of Dublin 4, of denying critics of the party's decision the leverage afforded by such a discrepancy between words and deeds. And the truly bizarre thing is that this tokenistic action will probably be sufficient to satisfy the self-appointed, literal-minded guardians of political morality, who believe integrity to be a matter of semantic consistency rather than straightforward matters of intention and effect.
It would have been a far better thing for Irish politics if Sargent had stood his ground and said he had simply changed his mind.