Dail Sketch/Frank McNally: Overnight agreement at Irish Ferries had ushered in the season of peace and goodwill.
The last Leaders Questions of 2005 was not quite the occasion for it, however. Before the parties could come out of the trenches to play football together in no-man's land, there was time for one final exchange of ill-will.
The Opposition had been presented with an early Christmas turkey in the form of the Department of Health's PPARS system, stuffed with €195 million of taxpayers' money and roasted to a tee by the Comptroller and Auditor General's report. Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte carved it up between them, and offered to force-feed Bertie Ahern. A "debacle" they called it, although the Taoiseach's script-writers had thought of a more delicate term.
New systems were in place, he said, to reduce the risk of "sub-optimal outcomes" in public service projects. Mr Rabbitte was scornful. A junior minister had been sacked "over a few cans of Dulux paint", while his superiors survived wasting such a large sum of money "you can't put enough noughts after it". Poor Ivor Callely. Unlike Tiny Tim, the onset of perspective on the Scrooge-like Opposition was too late to save him.
For Sinn Féin, the outcome by which the Minister for Justice continued in office was severely sub-optimal. CaoimhghíÓ Caoláin tried again to indict him over the Connolly affair, but his habit of calling him "McDole" again proved premature. Worse still, his indignant question - demanding to know the identity of the organisation allegedly trying to subvert the State - appeared to be the funniest thing the Government benches had heard all year. "You better make a few phone calls," said John O'Donoghue, amid raucous laughter.
Clearly the outbreak of Christmas spirit could be restrained no longer. Yet even in the traditional exchange of Yuletide greetings, there was time for one last parliamentary question, from Mr Kenny to the Ceann Comhairle. The former wanted to know what had happened to the term "Frig it, Enda!", uttered last week by Dr Rory O'Hanlon "in clearly audible Cavan-Monaghan terms", and since excised from the Dáil record.
The chair apologised for his "indiscretion", which the discretion of the Dáil reporters had erased. But "frig" was not necessarily the "mild expletive" Mr Kenny believed it to be, he said. According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Ulster Dialect, quoted by Dr O'Hanlon, it means a "working community in Donegal". So the official recorders may have acted hastily in editing a term by which the chair was merely advising the Fine Gael leader to join a Kibbutz in Buncrana.
And the f-word mystery cleared up, party leaders got on with the exchange of greetings, wishing each other an optimal Christmas and a super-optimal new year.