Modest, pleasant, hard-working, devoted to his family and, of course, a brilliant golfer, Harrington is an outstanding ambassador for Ireland. But please, please, please let us not use his success to once again drag out that old chestnut about Ireland needing an honours system.

The Taoiseach was doing just that last week. "Increasingly what we are seeing is [that] the British are now honouring Irish citizens. There's been a number of them in the last five years.

We should have a way, a national way, of honouring not just stars but people who make a contribution, an enomous contribution, to Irish life. The fact is that we don't have that, " he told a reception in Government Buildings hosted to mark Harrington's victory.

It's true, we "don't have that" and nor, with respect, Taoiseach, should we. We live in a Republic, where all citizens are supposed to be equal. Of course, true equality is a utopian ideal that unfortunately can never be achieved, but we should instinctively recoil from anything that formalises any type of pecking order.

A spokesman for the Taoiseach stressed afterwards that it was not necessary to mimic what is done in the UK, noting that France and a lot of republics "have different formats for doing so".

But while the Taoiseach can, no doubt genuinely, talk about honouring all those who make a contribution to Irish life, the reality is that such schemes, regardless of format, tend to have a particularly narrow definition of what constitutes success. To put it bluntly, they are generally stuffed full of careerists or extremely rich celebrities, who often don't represent the kind of role models we want to put forward for our children.

Apart from some blatant tokenism . . .the British, for example, awarded honours to lollipop ladies and binmen . . .such schemes don't reward the single parent, living in a deprived area, who puts his or her children through third level; or the teacher who stays after hours to train the school GAA team; or the working man who, on his holidays, drives a truck full of goods to underprivileged children on the other side of Europe; or those amazing people we see from time to time in a park or at the beach accompanying a group of people with special needs, giving their help and affection with a generosity that is humbling to observe.

Ireland is choc-a-bloc with such heroes who do extraordinary things every day of the week, but whose deeds will never earn as much as a paragraph in a local newspaper.

Despite what the Taoiseach says, honours schemes . . . be it in Britain or in France . . . are heavily biased towards "stars". Of course, many of those "stars" do make a major contribution to the society in which they live. But they are well rewarded, both financially and in terms of popular adulation, for that.

They do not need to be placed on an additional pedestal.

And by formally honouring such people, the risk is that, however unintentionally, you ever so slightly further erode the achievements of the ordinary man or woman who spends his or her life trying to do good or who achieves excellence in a field that doesn't happen to be as highprofile as sport or television.

Another feature of honours schemes elsewhere is the number of people honoured simply because of the job they hold . . . politicians, ambassadors, civil servants etc, rewarded for simply doing their job.

Of course, it would be possible to put in place a system that is more choosy about when and why it hands out honours and which isn't used by the government of the day to reward the loyal and curry favour with others. But, even leaving aside any cynicism one might have about the likelihood of that happening (check out, for example, how jobs for state boards are handed out), any scheme, however well-intentioned, will inevitably always be biased towards high-profile people. With the cult of celebrity an increasingly worrying aspect of modern Irish life, the last thing we need is a state-sponsored system helping to copperfasten it.

There is perhaps an argument that some sort of system should be put in place to reward those for service beyond the call of duty or for acts of heroism. But the likes of Padraig Harrington, for all his many virtues, simply does not fall into that category. As he would no doubt say himself, he was simply doing his job last Sunday . . . albeit a job that is extremely high-profile.

Harrington achieved a lifetime ambition last weekend and in the process put a smile on the face of hundreds of thousands of faces across Ireland . . . what further honour is needed?