Listen: did I not say, and on countless occasions, that the DUP would never go into power with Sinn Fein while the latter remained attached to the IRA army council?

Why, I'd have backed my certainty with the deeds of my house — and that was even before the IRA's Castlereagh raid, which scooped the Special Branch intelligence files; the Northern Bank robbery, which netted the IRA £17m; and the murder of Robert McCartney, with IRA involvement at the time, in the immediate aftermath, and in the continuing intimidation of both witnesses, and of Robert's sisters.

No, no, I said, I know the DUP. When these dour, plain-speaking Ulster Prods say something, they mean it; and when Ian Paisley says he'll never — NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! — go into power with Sinn Fein/IRA, he REALLY REALLY REALLY means it.

Then knock me down with a flea fart, but he goes into power with Sinn Fein/IRA, though the IRA army council still exists, the IRA still holds on to some weapons (especially the AN-94), Robert McCartney's murderers are free and laughing, (and probably the toast of their delightful communities) even as the Shinners wallow in the Northern Bank boodle and use the RUC intelligence documents as their bedtime reading.

Look. I know. The fault is mine. I'm thick. I should be placed in a padded cell and left to gibber. Nor is it just the Shinners. I clearly don't understand Irish society.

Though I was not alone in predicting that the smoking ban would never work, few commentators matched my ardent certainty that it was such a risible and totalitarian measure that the freedom-loving Irish people would simply laugh it to death.

Wrong again. The Irish people turned out to be instantly compliant lambs, as smoking in pubs vanished overnight. And when courts were sentencing pub-owners caught smoking in their own pubs to life imprisonment in the Arigna coalmines, yet merely fining shopkeepers a few farthings for selling cigarettes to children, I predicted that there would be a political outcry.

But there wasn't: merely the sound of sheep grazing.

So, every time a young man in a pub wants a cigarette, he goes outside and stands in the wind and the cold to have his smoke.

That way, he doesn't discommode strangers by forcing them to endure his smoke, or put them through the embarrassment of having to ask him not to smoke.

Yet at the end of the evening, he then gets into his car, way over the drink-driving limit, and goes off and kills some other strangers. And this, presumably, is his moral code: secondary smoking, evil! Drunken driving, ok, provided you don't get caught.

Maybe you understand this 'moral code'. I don't. I just don't. Is it that the Irish people are so thoroughly hypocritical that the smoking ban works because it is all about appearance, but the drink-driving laws don't, because they are all about conscience?

If that is the case, it suggests that the Irish conscience is a mighty elastic tape-measure that can stretch itself a long away indeed.

And perhaps there we have it, in two pub-related laws, the key to Irish morality, or the absence thereof.

It runs thus: it is when people can see you that you obey the law, and when it's up to you, you don't.

Which in essence means that personal morality in Ireland is a fiction: that like the Japanese, we live in a shame-culture.

It is only what other people think of you, not what you think of yourself, which counts. Which might explain a lot, but not everything, because it doesn't even begin to cover the DUP wallahs contradicting everything they'd ever said in public and (or so we thought) passionately believed, by going into government with Sinn Fein/IRA. And equally, the Shinners, having conducted an almost boundless carnival of murder and mayhem over decades, then decide it's their ball, they're taking it away with them, the game is over now, and now it's time for peace, and with them in power, but with no apologies to the tens of thousands of dead and wounded.

And moreover, whatever you do, DON'T TALK ABOUT THE WAR (unless it's to do with collusion).

Better still, most people (though not a handful of unregenerates like me, of course) accept these new rules — why, even the Shinner shin-shatterers themselves.

Thus, the lads in south Armagh, who were merrily torturing people to death in their beloved interrogation bath for decades, are suddenly law-abiding citizens again, with red pillar-boxes on their street and letters marked OHMS coming through the door, with a hey and ho and a hey nonny no.

You know, I don't understand any of it. None of it. You might well ask, that being the case, why am I a columnist?

A fair point. Equally, why have you read this far?