Dáil Sketch: With the Taoiseach away and the Tánaiste deputising on Leaders' Questions, Michael McDowell's sandwich analogy of coalition government was bound to feature in exchanges, writes Frank McNally.
As Big Mac sees it, it's not the "more bulky bread" that defines the flavour of a ruling partnership. The meat in the sandwich - currently prime PD rib - is what counts.
When it was Joe Higgins's turn at the deli counter yesterday, you just knew he was going to ask for the vegetarian option. But he approached the subject obliquely, via Tom Kitt's admission to the Mahon Tribunal about forgotten donations. This recalled for Joe a time when politics, at least in Dublin City Council, was all about bread, so much so that bread-men like Frank Dunlop were making regular deliveries to meet the demand.
Mr Higgins wondered if, in her capacity as Minister for Health, the Tánaiste was at all worried by the "latest pandemic of donations amnesia" to afflict Fianna Fáil.
By the standards that once cost the late Brian Lenihan his job, he said, the PDs should have been demanding Mr Kitt's head on a sesame seed bun. Instead, memory lapses no longer seemed to worry the Tánaiste, perhaps because "she herself accepted donations from speculators".
Offended - on behalf of the absent Taoiseach - that the McDowell analogy reduced Fianna Fáil's role in Government to a "soggy lump of batch", the Socialist Party TD also treated the House to a short history of the famous snack comprising two slices of bread with filling in between. He reminded us that it had been invented by the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, before indulging in his own piece of speculation at the PDs' expense.
"Apparently [ the earl] did not like getting his hands sticky by handling the meat directly," said Joe.
Returning to the political analogy and warming to his theme, he said that many people believed the Tánaiste's party only made it into the present Government sandwich because the lettuce was not washed properly: "They hope it will be scrubbed better when the next one is being prepared." Generously, in the circumstances, Ms Harney predicted Mr Higgins would himself make a "very tasty" ingredient in a future Government and suggested that he take up the possibility with the Opposition. Not that that's likely to appear on the Leinster House menu anytime soon.
But the prospect of the SP man forming part of a BLT with the Blueshirts, Labour and the Technical group (the Greens could be a side-salad) is certainly intriguing. The question is: who would be the bread in such a sandwich? By Mr McDowell's logic, it would have to be the largest party.
On the other hand, watching Enda Kenny reprise the role of Mr Angry over gun crime yesterday, the Fine Gael leader would also have a strong claim to be the ham.