Kindly Opposition helps with search in curious case of missing portfolios

DÁIL SKETCH:IT WAS unprecedented. Or certainly extremely rare. The Ceann Comhairle's lessons to the ranked TDs in the Dáil about procedures and functions may finally be paying off.

The results showed on yesterday’s Order of Business, the daily set piece when the Dáil agenda is set. It lasted a mere 17 minutes. Is it a record? Sinn Féin’s Pádraig MacLochlainn may have set another little record when he asked when the Tánaiste, as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, would take up the trade aspect of his role. He was told to put down a parliamentary question. He insisted it was a matter for legislation, but was told it was not and then repeated some six times the same sentence: “Can I get an answer to my question?”

He said there were two Ministers “without portfolio getting paid big salaries but not doing their jobs”.

One observer said officials at the trade end of the Minister’s portfolio probably have to enter the lofty eyrie of Iveagh House, home to the Department of Foreign Affairs, by the tradesmen’s entrance.

But whether the Tánaiste is without half his portfolio, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, is definitely without title at least. Legislation is required for establishing his department and until that is passed he is officially the “Minister without Portfolio”. And he was thus addressed when called to close the two-day debate on the review of the EU-IMF deal.

And while he may be without portfolio officially, the reality is he has embarked on the comprehensive spending review of the public service. “I spoke to every secretary generally and finance officer in every line department yesterday,” he said.

The debate was another opportunity to keep running the by now well-ventilated argument about whether Fine Gael and Labour in Government had a “new” deal with the EU-IMF or the Fianna Fáil one just worded differently.

Independent Thomas Pringle was in no doubt. The Government had made the Fianna Fáil deal “its own,” he said, insisting that they should now stop blaming the previous administration.

Fine Gael’s Liam Twomey was equally adamant that Ireland was “paying for the legacy of Fianna Fáil’s ruin of our reputation and economy”.

But Fianna Fáil’s Dara Calleary was having none of it, accusing the former senator of joining the “chorus” that the Government was constrained by the “straitjacket left by the previous government”. He suggested that Deputy Twomey would if he could “probably try to pin responsibility for the kidnap of Shergar and several other incidents on the previous government”.

The Minister without Portfolio took note of the contribution of his erstwhile colleague Joe Higgins. “I waited to see what his first sentence would be in his best, dramatic Kerry tradition, whether the Labour Party’s treachery was “profound” or “monumental”, said the Minister. “It is always one or the other. Today it was “profound”. Funnily enough, he has taken some of that dramatic Kerry tradition on board himself.

Acknowledging that the Government was “stuck” with the “bad deal” done by the previous administration, he said while the new deal was “not monumentally different from that which went before” it was “substantially different”. Imitation may indeed be the best form of flattery.