Dail sketch/ Paul Cullen: Modern armies are wont to send in drones to spy on the other side at no risk to themselves. Our home-grown Soldiers of Destiny, however, boast the most cunning, devious and generally indecipherable gadget of them all - the Bertie-drone.
He was at it again at question-time yesterday, numbing the Opposition into silence with a low-pitched, sleep-inducing susurration of mangled words and sawn-off sentences.
It all started so energetically, with Enda Kenny tearing into the Taoiseach about the "scandalous affair" of the €150 million spent on a banjaxed computer system for the health services.
It was standard parliamentary stuff: Opposition huffs and puffs about newspaper article it read earlier in the day; Government leader responds with reply scripted by civil servant. Throw in a little argy-bargy for the cameras and everyone's happy.
"We all know you have a history of writing blank cheques but how the hell did your Government spend €150 million on this botched project?" a strangely out-of-breath Fine Gael leader wanted to know.
The Opposition benches brayed. The Taoiseach stuck a second hand in his pockets. The monotone began.
It was very complex, this system, Bertie explained. Not just an IT system, but an entire human resources system. The comparisons made by by the deputy were "erroneous, not true, unfair and couldn't be done".
Still the House bubbled. Never had Enda heard such rubbish, he thundered; the Taoiseach was blaming "everybody but yourself". It was all "a litany of dishonour" from the Government.
The conqueror of Kilimanjaro slumped to his seat, his performance complete. His colleagues cheered, waved their papers, made funny cracks that no one could hear. Then it was there again, the low humming sound...
Worse, this time Bertie was reading, telling us more than we wanted to know about the 140 staff of the Health Service Executive (er, that should be 140,000) and their €7 billion payroll and their ICT system (um, I thought it wasn't an IT system). . .
It was all over now bar the shouting, and there was precious little of that. Labour TDs got a bit excited when Jan O'Sullivan raised the issue of school buses in Pallaskenry. For a while, it seemed her former party colleague, now Ceann Comhairle Séamus Pattison, might throw her out of the chamber but the Limerick TD sat down just in time.
There were questions aplenty on the peace process. Bertie assured the House he was satisfied the International Monitoring Commission had received "the totality and all" the decommissioning issues.
Like the rest of us, he looked puzzled as Sinn Féin's Arthur Morgan demanded to know when the officials would be disarmed and their weapons decommissioned. Then we realised Arthur was talking about the Official IRA, not the IMC.
Bertie described loyalist threats to deface graves in Ballymena as "revulsive". The investigation into the Northern Bank robbery was, he warned, a "complex issue".
An entire parliament held its breath. "I'll say no more," the Taoiseach added, to the sound of audible relief all round.