The Fr Brendan Smyth paedophile scandal brought down one government in the Republic. It should at the very least cast a stain of shame over the current administration north of the border.
When Chris Moore's groundbreaking television documentary exposed Smyth as a serial chid rapist and abuser, the Irish state grossly mishandled the controversy.
The Attorney General's office resisted extraditing Smyth to Northern Ireland and into the Royal Ulster Constabulary's hands.
And when Dick Spring, the Tanaiste and Labour leader in the coalition, found out about this he eventually pulled his party out of government.
The suspicion among Labour deputies at the time was that the conservative elements within Fianna Fail and the senior ranks of the civil service were more concerned about protecting the Catholic Church than they were about getting justice for child rape victims.
From basking in the glow of the IRA ceasefire a year before, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds’ career and indeed his ambition to become Irish President were effectively finished.
Successive southern governments eventually learned from the mistakes of the Smyth debacle and eventually drew up wide-ranging judicial-led inquiries into the raft of other paedophile priest controversies that rocked the Catholic Church.
These inquiries were all inclusive and covered the abuse carried out not only into church-run institutions like their notorious industrial schools but also the crimes committed by individual members of the clergy.
Now the present five-party coalition at Stormont is in danger of replicating the incompetent behaviour of the Reynolds-led government.
The family who exposed Smyth for abusing four of their five children are outraged to learn that a Stormont-led inquiry won't cover the crimes committed against their children at the time.
They regard it as “an insult” that the inquiry led by retired judge Sir Anthony Hart only includes those children abused in church-run institutions.
Moreover, up to 50 more people are preparing a legal challenge against the inquiry's terms of reference. What was supposed to be an attempt by the power-sharing executive to address the long-term hurt and damage inflicted on children is rapidly turning into a PR disaster.
The limited nature of the inquiry means, for example, that the crimes of Fr Daniel Curran, who abused children on day trips, would not be covered. Nor would it seem those even held in institutions before 1945 can be included in the inquiry.
Were the latter's experiences at the hands of clerical child rapists and abusers somehow less serious?
All this begs another obvious question: did the authorities in Northern Ireland not even bother consulting with their southern counterparts?
It is perverse to learn that Smyth's abuse of the four west Belfast children is excluded from the inquiry at present.
After all, it was their parents who broke the silence about the paedophile's crimes at a time when to speak out against the Catholic Church was regarded (especially by the more conservative, Vatican-loyal northern Catholics) as tantamount to theocratic treason.
If this is all simply a bureaucratic bungle rather than a conspiracy, then it is possible the Northern Ireland Executive should be able to fix it.
But if there is something more political lurking behind the reason for all these exclusions it could ultimately prove to be deeply damaging to the government up on the hill.
The west Belfast couple who bravely stood up against not only Church but also the southern State were finally given recognition in last year's excellent TV drama ‘Brendan Smyth: Betrayal of Trust’.
If this debacle over who cannot be included in the forthcoming inquiry continues, without the families getting what they want, the drama producers should get back to their laptops.
This time they can subtitle their new film ‘Betrayal of Trust....Again’.