It was only a question of when it would happen, rather than if it would. Drapier refers, of course, to the clumsy attempt to damage Bernard Durkan as a member of Jim Mitchell's Public Accounts team. It was as inept as it was nasty, and in its timing and execution it lacked both subtlety and impact.
Indeed, the irony of the exercise is that it merely succeeded in drawing attention to the care Jim Mitchell and his legal team have taken in ensuring that their act was together and all proper precautions had been taken to ensure that the integrity of the inquiry was not damaged. The stakes are too high to allow for any other approach.
In any event, Drapier was impressed with Jim Mitchell's immediate and robust defence of Mr Durkan and with the solidarity and team approach of his colleagues on the PAC sub-committee. Party divisions are totally absent, and the emphasis is sharply on protecting the public interest; in other words, getting at the truth.
From what he hears Drapier is certain that the PAC is making a real impact with the public and has won respect for the way it is doing its business.
As for the source of the Durkan leak, there need be no great mystery. Given that Charlie McCreevy had already been approached by the ACC and turned down by him, the next step was obvious, and so it transpired. No surprise either were the "revelations" about the former ACC chairwoman, Gary Joyce, after the depth charges she dropped at the tribunal.
The PAC is proving to be an enthralling exercise. TG4's televising is a real winner and underlines once again Drapier's point that all tribunals from now on should be covered by live television.
Meanwhile, it is intriguing to contrast the styles of the various actors at the PAC. So far, in Drapier's view, the Bank of Ireland team has done best. Their approach was courteous and informed, apparently open, and in Pat Molloy they had a witness of real substance.
Like all the others, there are some skeletons, or at least some areas of doubt, still in their cupboard, but, that aside, it was the best team performance to date.
The contrast with some of the others could hardly be greater. The top levels of the Revenue were all over the place, with a lot of questions still hanging there. The less said about the crassness of some of the ACC performance the better, while at times NIB behaved as if the Republic itself was some sort of offshore entity. The underlying arguments of some of its performers, given all that has happened, are breathtaking or brazen, whichever you prefer.
NOR have the accountants covered themselves in glory. It was a case of,if you were in a small business we will force you to comply, but if you were very rich we don't want to lose your account and, of course, the rules are different for somebody like you. But then we heard much along similar lines in the days of the Goodman tribunal, so why we should be surprised is something of a mystery.
Let's hope that something more happens than happened after Goodman.
And now it is over to Ansbacher. Mary Harney has been hinting for some time, but now she has put up. No bigger bomb will ever be dropped into the Irish corporate world. And before some readers start lumping politicians and civil servants in with the corporate world, let Drapier draw breath.
For the most part, the corporate and political worlds did not overlap. A small few politicians did rub shoulders, a smaller number still were let in behind the doors, but for the most part the business world treated politicians in those days with disdain and treated the Civil Service with bemused contempt.
As Drapier said, a small number of politicians did make it in, likewise a handful or so of former civil servants, but that was that, so any talk of a great conspiracy is nonsense and simply an excuse for lazy thinking.
In many ways politicians are even more shocked by the current spate of revelations. It was the very laws we were enacting which were so comprehensively flouted by the Ansbacher people, and we were the people bearing the brunt of the PAYE anger at that time and incurring public wrath as a result of spending cutbacks.
Politicians in this country stay close to the people. They have to, or they won't stay in politics for long. One of the great and repeated complaints made against us in this period was that politics was not attracting business people and offered little real attraction for an entrepreneur. If Drapier heard that once at a chamber of commerce lunch or in his local golf club, he heard it 100 times.
So his word is: let us investigate Ansbacher, let the chips fall where they may, let the law be applied in its full rigour, but stop blaming politicians, because clever lawyers, clever accountants, greedy businessmen operated outside that law, and all but got away with it.
THE blame lies fairly and squarely with the individuals concerned, who all too often lectured the rest of us, deprecated our political system, which they told us was "hostile" to the real needs of business, and then behaved as if they were some sort of exempt species as far as compliance was concerned.
Drapier has great confidence that we will get to the bottom of much of it. His confidence is increased greatly by the fact that Declan Costello will head the High Court team. In Drapier's book Declan Costello is one of the formidable political and legal figures of the past 40 years.
He has a sharp mind, unshakeable integrity and a very clear sense of the public interest. He is, and always has been, his own man, and the public is fortunate that someone of his calibre is taking on this task.
Given what Drapier has just been saying it may seem odd that he now turns to the McEvaddy affair and says that enough is enough. In Drapier's experience, Ulick and Des McEvaddy have always been upfront and open. They have lobbied, as is their entitlement, and their agenda has always been an open one.
Ulick McEvaddy likes politics and is not averse to the foot-slog of canvassing or the dreariness of branch meetings.
It is easy to see why Mary Harney makes such an attractive target. The PDs were not lighthanded in their past fulminations. In truth, they were often hurtful and nasty, deeply personal in their frenzied indignation.
But that said, Drapier doesn't see Mary Harney or Charlie McCreevy being improperly influenced by a few days in the villa. Yes, it was an error of judgment, a pretty serious one, but in Drapier's view no more than that.
There are bigger and better targets around and, schadenfreude apart, there is no good reason to make more out of all this than the facts warrant. And, in Drapier's view, that is little enough.