The Cabinet had banned magic mushrooms with immediate effect. But as the Dáil got into its spring stride yesterday, you feared the ban had come too late. Midway through Leaders' Questions, it was clear the Government was having a bad trip, writes Frank McNally..
Like many bad trips, this one centred on the M50. The Opposition stopped just short of suggesting Martin Cullen had been on mind-altering substances when he announced up to four new tolls for Dublin's ring-road. But in the ensuing Dáil row, there was confusion about whether the plan was a Government decision, or a mere hallucination.
Pat Rabbitte suggested that if the "hare-brained" plan was real, road users would string Mr Cullen up from one of his proposed overhead gantries (for barrier-free scanning equipment). Having listened to the Taoiseach's comments, however, the Labour leader thought Mr Ahern had saved road users the trouble. Either Bertie was "playing with words" or he was "backing off" the plan, and if the latter, the Minister was swinging already.
Just as the Taoiseach thought he had successfully backed off the subject of the M50, his hopes were rear-ended by Joe Higgins. In a tour de force, the former teacher combined history, geography and Greek mythology to justify his demand that the motorway and the West-Link bridges be nationalised.
"If a warlord in the Hindu Kush controlled a vital pass and fleeced the unfortunate peasants who had to use it every day for their livelihoods, some people would say: 'that's Afghanistan and it's the dark ages'," he said.
But even Afghan peasants had it easy compared with victims of the West-Link, the Socialist Party man suggested. His research into tolling history had thrown up the example of Charon, the boatman who for a fee ferried souls from the realm of the living, across the River Styx, into the realm of the dead. Mr Higgins didn't specify which of these realms was north of the Liffey, but he thought Charon would do brisk business if he set up in competition with NTR.
The Taoiseach riposted that if the Socialist Party's policies had been implemented in the past, economic success and traffic jams would never have been a problem here. He was even more strident when rebuffing Enda Kenny's criticisms of the Government's alleged carelessness with early childcare payment, vis-a-vis migrants.
A huffy Fine Gael leader demanded an apology for Brian Lenihan's suggestion that his party was "racist" in raising the issue. And while Mr Ahern accepted it was not, he said that if the Government had excluded migrants, "I'd have been called the biggest racist in this house".
Irish emigrants in the EU had benefited for decades from similar arrangements and there was no use "groaning and moaning now" because the situation had been reversed, he said.
It was a good moment for the Taoiseach, but thanks to the Government's subsequent pile-up on the M50, the Fine Gael leader was not downcast for long. When Michael Ring added to Mr Cullen's ring-road pain by calling the multiple toll plan "worse than electronic voting", the FG leader enjoyed the quip more than most. Mr Ring used to be a dissident, but as Mr Kenny smiled at him benignly, he looked like a man who was having a happy trip; perhaps one involving a rainbow, a Rabbitte and a spring election.