"In the world of politics today, there is truth and there are fig leaves.

No one admits to making real mistakes anymore.

So, Paul Wolfowitz was run out of town last week on a fig leaf.

The World Bank president presented the world with a carefully negotiated statement that pretended to exonerate him while slicing and dicing ethics and truth as he was run out of the institution.

Was he fired, or allowed to resign, in disgrace?

Of course not. He had the fig leaf that the huge raise awarded to his girlfriend was not really his fault, his doing or his legacy.

In the immortal words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now hanging over the U.S. Department of Justice, "mistakes were made." As soon as the gremlin that made them is found, he will be dealt with most severely.

The official Washington political obituary is as close to truth as the official Wolfowitz policy in Iraq is to success.

Truth is, the girlfriend pay scandal was all the excuse the World Bank’s other member nations needed to toss Wolfowitz out the door for rank hypocrisy, not to mention for leading a false charge of U.S. and Western blood, treasure and moral standing into the oily sands of Iraq.

By leading a charge against World Bank corruption when he became president of that organization, he left himself with nothing but a fig leaf on the accusation of personal hypocrisy.

While Wolfowitz was headed down and out on May 17, a few blocks away at the Embassy of Ireland, a world success story was quietly being celebrated.

The official Washington dance around truth could not have stood in more stark contrast with the honest expressions of gratitude and faith in reconciliation at the miraculous rising of peace and prosperity that has transformed all of Ireland, north and south, feast and blest.

Ireland has risen from poverty and factionalism to peace and prosperity in the relative flash of a few historical moments.

Fintan O’Toole, a columnist and critic for The Irish Times, helped a crowd of Virginians at the embassy celebrate the Irish success story and the release of a book, "Re-Imagining Ireland," that beautifully documents what Ireland was and is becoming.

His talk at the embassy helped Americans better understand how changing the question can help bitterly fighting factions overcome bloody stalemate.

When England never could seem to solve "the Irish question," part of the reason was the ability of the Irish, whenever an answer seemed in sight to London, to change the question.

Changing the question can help warring parties evade solution, or changing it in the right ways can help redefine and re-imagine problems to allow fighting sides to accept and embrace peace.

The Irish finally agreed in the north to change insoluble questions, such as "What do we have to have?", to the better question of "What can we all live with?"

O’Toole laid out a tapestry of Irish history and was part of the planning and execution of the book, "Re-Imagining Ireland," and the May 2003 international conference of the same name held in Charlottesville by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (where, in the interests of full disclosure, my wife works).

Editor Andrew Higgins Wyndham, who directs media programs at the foundation, imagined and then created the conference, which brought more than 100 Irish luminaries to Charlottesville and then put many of them into the book, including O’Toole.

The Irish journalist spoke of how Irish immigration to America helped those left behind in Ireland imagine a better life and strive to achieve it. Circular waves of Irish diaspora to and from America and throughout the world helped Ireland transform itself from rural poverty to a dynamic, knowledge-based economy that brings better lives to millions.

Irish poets, writers and artists outpaced the state and the church in the nation’s conversion.

By mixing church and state, Ireland had held itself and its people back, as the church too much became authority and a rigid, limiting force holding back freedom, O’Toole said.

He celebrated Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom as a beacon for imagining Irish progress and freedom.

Once the church was no longer as tightly tied to state authority, people in Ireland gained religious freedom and gained faith.

One wonders if religious freedom and the freedom of residents of Iraq to emigrate to America can help that nation ask better questions and deal in truth instead of trading in fig leaves." (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, May 20, 2007)