And Carole Coleman, RTE's former Michael Moorette.

Formal attire for guests and officers leads to some comedy. In an oversized hall, young men whose voices have just about stopped changing swan in ill-fitting dinner jackets. Their satinwrapped female colleagues sported Oscar-night-worthy cleavage, tittering as a pubescent chap read out minutes of the previous meeting with jokes on syphillis, Nymphomaniacs Anonymous and "Club Filth", as wine flowed and beer warmed. For those unimpressed with the awkward sexuality of today's Trinners, there was a racy flirtation with anti-Semitism.

Student Brian O'Beirne read a lengthy paper that was in essence a summary . . . a poor one . . . of a recent book by two American academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Mearsheimer-Walt argue, a priori, that the US's support of Israel may have made sense during the Cold War, but now lacks strategic or moral rationale and has made the US a target for Arab hatred and terrorist attack. Therefore, they leap, American support for Israel can only be explained by the power of "the lobby" (the missing adjective being either Jewish or proIsrael). They conclude, in a tradition harking back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that 'the Jews' (under currently more acceptable label The Neocons) tricked the US into invading Iraq against its own best interests.

The format, as the American guests seemed surprised to learn, is for guests to respond to the paper and field constant interruptions . . . which in this case had little to do with the topic they were invited to address. The first speaker, Joshua Muravchik, of Washington's American Enterprise Institute and a leading Neocon, was quite overwhelmed by what he clearly felt was an ambush. As a former chairman of the Young People's Socialist League in the '60s, Muravchik should be used to fluid floor-debate, but he did himself few favours in spluttering rebuttals.

Next came once and future Dail candidate and Irish AntiWar Movement boss Richard Boyd Barrett . . . now one of Ireland's most articulate speakers after five years in the public eye . . . who started by distancing himself from the paper, declaring a "slight danger" of sliding into an anti-Semitic critique of US foreign policy.

Note to The Phil: when Boyd Barrett . . . who this weekend planned an event around a top propagandist for terrorist group Hezbollah (denied an entry visa by the Irish government) . . . says your views are unacceptable, you've got problems.

Some of Boyd Barrett's own critique of American foreign policy is spot on: that the US has propped up despotic Arab regimes to keep the oil flowing, a much bigger problem than the US-Israel relationship. He may not realise it's the same critique offered by some Neocons. Where he takes the argument from there . . . that it's all really about China . . . gets batty, but his views are at least arrived at honestly.

The evening really did threaten to be merely a depressing display of how shabby and shallow the scions of Ireland's elite can be, until James Risen from The New York Times spoke.

Risen politely dubbed the proceedings "entertaining" and expressed his thanks for the opportunity to visit Ireland and discover his Monaghan roots, delivered in a way that made clear he was unlikely to come back.

His own analysis of how things got this bad is both the most credible and the most informed of any you're likely to hear. For 18 months, US foreign policy was unmoored from its institutional base and was personally freelanced, day-to-day, by George Bush and Dick Cheney. Ignoring decades of built-up expertise, extraordinarily bad decisions were made. The utter failure to articulate a credible rationale for the war in Iraq . . . instead building a case on non-existent WMDs . . . left a vacuum filled by every kind of conspiracy theory, from 'the Jews' to 'the oil' to whatever you're having yourself.

Dumb is always a less satisfying explanation than Evil.

And definitely less sexy. So unlikely to be recorded in the minutes of the world's oldest debating society.