Maybe now we can close the book on the potato famine, consign the No Irish Need Apply signs to history and concede that Judge W. Arthur Garrity was as sincere in his aims as Billy Bulger was in his.

The word from the wedgwood blue Massachusetts Senate chamber is that Himself will pack in his political career today.

It's a great day for the Irish.

For all the criticism of his dictatorial rule during his nine unprecedented terms as president of the Senate, it is the damage Bulger inflicted on his own people that is his saddest legacy.

A half-century after it ceased to have any meaning, Bulger continued to stoke the fires of Irish resentment toward Boston's moneyed Protestant class. Never mind that men named Murray, Flatley and Connors share the helm of Boston commerce. Bulger made the Irishman-as-victim a political cottage industry.

James Michael Curley first perfected the theme, exploiting the rancor between Brahmin and Irishman for political advantage through 10 mayoral campaigns over four decades. It was cynical enough then, when memories of oppression at the hands of English overlords were as fresh as the calloused knees of Irish women scrubbing the floors of the State Street Bank.

It is worse than cynical now. After 35 years in political life, Bulger still nurses the wounds of Boston Irish history, still savors the sting of old Yankee anti-Catholic prejudices.

There is a story former State Sen. George Bachrach tells of trying to cajole Bulger to take the lead during the upstart effort to reform the rules in the Legislature a dozen years ago.

"You could be a hero," Bachrach recalls telling the Senate president.

"You guys from Cambridge can be heroes, but guys like me can't," Bulger replied. "I'll always be a redneck mick from South Boston."

No one ensured that view of Bulger more than Bulger himself. It was as though he stubbornly refused to rise above his roots. He read Greek for pleasure and denied his children television to foster a love of books. His Jesuit education yielded an understanding of the ancient world, but little appreciation for dilemmas of the modern one.

He was right about so many things: about loyalty to place; about the central, but subterranean, role that class plays in this city; about the invisibility of the quiet struggles of working people in a news media obsessed with confrontation.

His opposition to busing to desegregate the schools sprang from an honest attachment to Southie; he still lives not two miles from the housing project where he spent his childhood.

But his inability to see beyond the South Boston peninsula trapped him in a venomous dance with anyone who did not share that world view. So Kevin White, Ted Kennedy, and especially Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity were transformed into lace curtain lackeys, the Irish puppets of a Yankee aristocracy long dead. (It is unclear whether Garrity's larger sin was ordering the buses to roll or living in WASP-y Wellesley.)

Bill Bulger is not a racist man, but he is much too proud of being a parochial one. For him to challenge the insularity of his neighbors would be to betray them somehow. So he stood in the back of that hall in South Boston and listened to the racist invective against integrating public housing and said nothing.

For all of his classical education, how do we distinguish Bill Bulger's silence from Dapper O'Neil's rantings?

If he has a coherent political philosophy, the departing Senate president has never articulated it. His political career has brought a measure of financial security to his neighbors, directly through patronage jobs, indirectly through his votes to protect the social services on which so many of them depend. That appears to have been how he viewed his job.

In the past dozen years, Boston -- always an immigrant's city -- has been transformed once again. More than 40 percent of the city's residents are from minority groups. It will be a clear majority when the century turns.

Fourteen languages are taught in the public schools. The disenfranchised no longer have red curls and freckles, just as the entitled no longer all trace their roots to Plymouth Rock. (Bill Weld is from Smithtown, N.Y.)

"If you look at my vote, I do better as I get closer to my home address," Bill Bulger said five years ago. "The further away, the more difficult it is."

Amherst and the ethnically diverse state university he will lead into the next century could hardly be farther away from Southie and still be in Massachusetts. But education is said to be a broadening experience. One can hope.