Empathy is the currency of modern politics. Keep your eyes on the prize, but if they're dry, you could still be run out of office. Take this year's prebudget sideshow, the public flogging of the hapless Tim O'Malley, minister for crazy and pinata for shrinks.

O'Malley demonstrates an inclination towards controversy but little talent for it. In November, he gave an inarticulate interview to the Irish Medical News in which he was quoted as saying that "there's a very strong view with a lot of people that depression and mental illness is [sic] not a medical condition, that it's part of life's events that people get depressed or get unhappy".

Such cloudy thinking was promptly distilled to evil in the pages of The Irish Times.

Pursued by a mental-health lynch mob led by Prof Patricia Casey, O'Malley was accused of "re-stigmatising" those with mental illness. A cynic might point out that O'Malley's pursuers generally conceded at least part of what we may guess what his argument actually was, if he had one at all . . .

that there is a legitimate school of thought embraced by respectable experts which argues that depression is hugely over-diagnosed and questions the assumption that it is a biologically based disease in the same sense as, say, cancer.

O'Malley then did something far worse. He challenged the carers-in-chief. On RTE's Prime Time, he speculated that at least part of the reason for long queues for kids to see psychiatrists could be consultants who "like to have long waiting lists" which make them feel "kind of powerful".

Open season on O'Malley ensued. His new pursuers weren't just the nice men in white coats coming to take him away, but fellow permanent residents of the Dail funny farm. Knowing they hadn't a hope of scoring points against the budget, the opposition seized an opportunity and demanded a resignation.

O'Malley had "proved" by his comments that he had "no warmth, no empathy and no understanding" with families of people with mental-health problems.

Having recently learned at great cost that empathy trumps all in modern politics, the opposition thought they had a potent weapon . . . a government minister with an empathy disorder.

Unaccountably, the opposition failed to realise that O'Malley would be defended by Bertie Ahern, the man who recently conducted the national masterclass in the politics of empathy. The mere threat of one TV tear over his family and the misunderstood generosity of Paddy the Plasterer transformed coalition collapse and early election to Fianna Fail's current halcyon holiday. It would be wrong to judge a minister's whole career by a moment of weakness, said the Taoiseach who may have used that line before somewhere. It would victimise the minister.

It would require you to have empathy with the minister's suffering. What about his family? Would it be fair on them?

Will no one think of the children?

So having begun the fortnight in a fumbling grasp for common sense against what Fay Weldon called "therapism" and "emotional correctness" 10 years ago, O'Malley is saved by its most accomplished practitioner.

Meanwhile, the quite real problem . . . mental health and measuring and improving the performance of mental-health professionals . . . is ignored and becomes impossible to make the subject of a rational conversation.

Even before Prime Time, we had Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child psychiatry at Trinity College and chairman of the Irish Association of Suicidology, speaking at his group's annual conference about the budget:

"This is the dark side of the Celtic Tigerf We are jumping up and down about tax cuts and stamp duty, but a child's mental health does not matter."

Give us what we want or you're hurting autistic children, you heartless bastards.

It's not subtle, and we'll be hearing a lot of this sort of cheap, bullying nonsense, with children used despicably as moral battering rams in the weeks leading up to a referendum on the rights of children.

Anybody crazy enough to stand up to this tyranny of empathy had better learn how the game is played: Be prepared to use your biography as a defence, be more on the side of children than they are and most critical of all . . . learn how to well-up on demand.