Ignoring the Celtic Tiger to resurrect almost a pig-in-the-parlour image of Ireland, BBC's main soap opera, East Enders, has been offensive these past two nights. The Beeb knows it and that's why it has apologised.
This week, the show's central Fowler family is in Ireland to meet mother Pauline's long-lost half sister. Although soap opera characters are seldom the most subtly drawn, they need not be gross stereotypes. Presenting the series' principal Oirish characters as a drunken, debauched father, a mercilessly martyred mother and a broth of a boy gushing Blarney baloney is evidence of, at worst, malice and, at best, ignorance.
It is likely that the latter is the case. It usually is when Britain looks at Ireland. British ignorance about Ireland is not only legendary, it is, in the interests of their sustaining an implausible superiority complex, almost compulsory.
The cows, sheep and donkeys wandering around a town street, might, at a pinch, have been excused as atmospheric hyperbole. But, the depictions of Irish people as a kind of dark peasantry from the Hammer Horror genre is unacceptable.
Or, are we possibly being too thin-skinned about this? I don't think so. East Enders has been insulting in portraying Ireland as backward and peopled by unfriendly and uncouth boors. But, whether anger or bemusement is the healthier emotional response is another matter.
After all, it is their ignorance, their rudeness, their uncouthness which is shown up. Certainly, Ireland, as most of us who live here experience it, is not like the Ireland of East Enders. (Then again, of course, even Cockney culture is not as East Enders represents it.)
Perhaps the darkest, most mean-minded touch on Monday's episode was the ambiguous intimation that an Irishman at the airport had sinister intentions towards three-year-old Lucy. The wonder was they didn't make him a Catholic priest. Since then, drunkenness, overcrowding, dirtiness, even corporal punishment have featured as characteristic of the locals.
The great irony, of course, is that as Pauline's half-sister is depicted as typical of martyred, browbeaten, Irish womanhood, four women are fighting for the country's highest office. There's also the odd soap coincidence that Glenroe's Miley Byrne is being unfairly held in a London cop shop at present. Clearly, soap opera diplomacy isn't great for Anglo-Irish relations.
But, if we genuinely are confident and not unduly upset by British blindness towards Irish progress, this East Enders gaffe might actually help to dilute the dangerously resilient Punch-style bigotry which continues to thrive in Britain. Maybe.