President tells it like it is, but we can’t say such things these days

“I WAS only ever wrong once,” goes the favourite joke of a friend of mine. “It happened once when I thought I was wrong, but I was actually right!”

I'm dedicating this gag to President Mary McAleese who last weekend had to apologise for her assessment of Protestant bigotry in Northern Ireland in the bad old days even though she was actually right in what she said.

In an interview to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she said that Nazis had "given their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics".