The President, Mrs Robinson, was at it again 10 days ago, forcing us to start thinking the unthinkable for the sake of peace and reconciliation on this island. Addressing the Merriman Summer School in Co Clare, she asked the audience to consider their reaction to the proposition that Ireland rejoin the Commonwealth. Mrs Robinson stressed that she was not posing the question as a political issue, but in the context of Irish people's continuing insecurity about their identity.
"I think it is a good way of assessing the insecurities that we still have after 75 years - the lack of a firm sense of ourselves, so that we cannot address that question without a great deal of hesitation and emotion and conflicting views and no real clear lines of direction."
There was plenty of hesitation and emotion among the views expressed afterwards. Any mention of the historical baggage of the British link still touches a very sore nerve. The idea of rejoining the modern successor of the hated empire we fought so hard to leave is an outrage to many people.
But the President did not raise such a fundamental issue merely to provoke. It is clearly something she has been thinking about at least since 1994 when she met the Commonwealth Secretary General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria, at the Commonwealth Games in Canada.
At their private meeting she said some complimentary things about the Commonwealth - about its multi-racial and multi-cultural diversity, its commitment to the rule of law and reaching agreement through consensus, its belief in friendship and co-operation between the developed and developing worlds, and so on.
SINCE then we have had several steps towards peace in Northern Ireland. In two weeks the most important discussions on the North's future perhaps since its formation will begin. Both unionists and republicans are being asked to make huge compromises.
But what price are we in the Republic prepared to pay for the beginning of lasting peace and harmony on this island? Not a very high price, I suspect. It's not a debate I've heard yet, so I don't know.
I wonder if people in the Republic feel they are so little part of the problem that they don't have to make any sacrifices for peace. If that's the majority opinion, let's hear it. But let's at least start a debate about what contribution, if any, the citizens of this Republic think they should make to the cause of peace in the North.
That's what Mrs Robinson is trying to do, I believe, with her suggestion about the Commonwealth. She knows that for the Republic to signal its willingness to rejoin the Commonwealth in the event of a Northern settlement would send out a very powerful message to the unionists that this is no longer the profoundly anti-British society it was up to 25 years ago.
And for the people of the Republic to choose to recognise the British queen as the symbol of "free association" between Britain, Ireland and 52 countries throughout the world would have an even greater impact on that passionately royalist community.
Would the present-day Commonwealth - not the British Commonwealth - be such a terrible group of nations to join? Thirty-eight of its 53 members are either republics or monarchies with their own heads of state, recognising the British monarch merely as the symbol of their "free association".
In recent years countries as different as Portuguese-speaking Mozambique, French-speaking Cameroon and Rwanda, and Palestine (through the PLO) have either joined or expressed an interest in joining.
THE Commonwealth has often been an influential voice for morality and justice in international relations. It led the world in imposing sanctions against South Africa, in the teeth of fierce opposition from Margaret Thatcher's Britain. President Mandela's first foreign policy decision was to bring South Africa back into the Commonwealth.
He was later to become the main advocate of Nigeria's suspension from the group following the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. It was a very rare example of a nation effectively being expelled from an international organisation for human rights violations, and even rarer because it was not engineered by the rich West but by Nigeria's fellow African nations.
It was the Commonwealth finance ministers in 1994 who launched the plan which resulted in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund selling off gold reserves to use the income to wipe out some of the crippling foreign debts of the world's poorest countries.
It was the Commonwealth prime ministers, led by New Zealand's Jim Bolger and opposed by John Major, who took the lead in condemning France's Pacific nuclear tests.
But what exactly is the point of the Commonwealth? Even Michael Fathers, the New Zealand journalist who is the organisation's spokesman, is pushed to define it. He says its members certainly don't feel they are carrying any British imperial baggage. It is not even certain if Prince Charles - if he ever makes it to the throne - would become the Commonwealth's titular head, since that title is bestowed by the organisation's heads of government.
When pressed, Fathers says it is a friendly international network which can be extremely useful for a country's national interest. With Commonwealth countries as members of virtually all the world's military and trading blocs, it can also serve as an invaluable bridge between them.
In the past India has used it in its drive to lead the non-aligned group at the UN, and Canada to distinguish itself from the United States as a friend of the Third World. A House of Commons report last year complained that Britain was failing to capitalise on the huge economic market represented by the group's 53 countries.
So at least let us talk about this interesting idea for helping the unionists to feel more at home with the Republic. It would be far better to debate the pros and cons of rejoining the Commonwealth than rehearse the pernicious nonsense heard again recently about whether demographic change will eventually see a nationalist majority in Northern Ireland.
Common sense should make it abundantly clear that even 49.9 per cent of Northerners bitterly opposed to a united Ireland will constitute an effective block to Irish unity.
The time has come for new, imaginative and courageous compromises all round. Not for the first time, our President is pointing the way.