WHAT have we learned in this past couple of months about ourselves and the society we live in?
Even the most unthinking have learned more than the specimens who make up today's British government.
Or so you'd have to conclude by the cut of them, as out they came like the figures in a cuckoo clock with their learned-off lines in defence of jeering, fleering Dominic Cummings.
Here as in Britain we chug along, most of us doing our best, moaning as little as possible, biting back jitters about restrictions relaxed too early after testing done too little and too late.
Most people know the worst is happening to a minority; oldest, poorest, the silenced and unvisited in care homes.
Though that is not to deny the pain of people who have stayed at work, or are going back, because they fear losing jobs which are unsafe to do.
Anyone who knows frontline health workers also knows that care assistants, like cleaners, people on checkouts, are slogging through daily dangers for pay that rarely amounts to the minimum wage.
Until this point at any rate, they have had no clout and much less purchase on public sympathy than nurses and doctors.
But the weekly 'clap for carers' has gone a bit sour. The original inspirer did well this week past to suggest phasing it out.
The sense that beats below the sentiment is that there must be better pay and conditions, and security for immigrants long treated as unwelcome then gushed over as heroes.
That sense forced Boris Johnson into his U-turn on the NHS surcharge, only a day after putting his head down mulishly in the virtual Commons in graceless denial of Keir Starmer's points.
A blow for the equally shameless Priti Patel; but then only a prime minister and party leader foreign to shame would have appointed Patel in the first place.
It is probably the case that British as well as Irish television and radio news have had bigger audiences here over the past two months than ever before.
What has been happening in care homes takes the shine off any admiration for the independence of local judgment. Though it is undeniably clear that most European states have also failed those in institutional care
An academic study or two must be brewing. No matter how fascinating some profess to find Stormont performances, awareness of London financing to rescue business and stave off redundancies is matched by curiosity about the state of play across the border.
The Cummings codology came on the heels of those lockdown relaxations that Edinburgh and Cardiff disdained, and which were unfollowed, for a wonder, by Stormont unionists.
What has been happening in care homes takes the shine off any admiration for the independence of local judgment. Though it is undeniably clear that most European states have also failed those in institutional care.
The slightest temptation to whinge about adult children far away, flights unlikely to resume in the near future or so fraught with danger they are unthinkable, comes up against hard reality.
Many, probably the majority, of those who have spent decades doing the painful and unpleasant work of caring for our demented, immobile and frail relatives, are on the other side of the world from their own old people and, sometimes, also from their children.
Here out of need, out of poverty, almost always gentle and professional. Though as Filipino nurses will tell those they come to know, it is alien to their culture to 'put' their own old into institutions.
This is something those of us who have or have had relatives in care stumble upon, and then very often forget, as soon as the cared-for die and it is no longer necessary to visit those mis-named 'homes'.
What have we learned about ourselves and the society we live in? That paying emotive tributes to health-workers is fine but empty.
That we out-source, most of us, the hardest part of family life with few qualms that out-last our necessary links with care homes.
We would rather clap for carers than think about their lives.
