Unlike nursing homes facing inspection, the Taoiseach does not get advance notice of subjects to be raised during Leaders' Questions. Even so, he didn't need a tip-off from the local health board to know what was going to come up yesterday.
As the team of inspectors led by Enda Kenny arrived for their 4.15pm appointment, Mr Ahern was already putting aside his pre-prepared answer on the crisis in the EU, and reaching instead for his pre-prepared answer on Monday's Prime Time documentary.
For a few years now, Government Ministers have promised an independent inspectorate for the social services. The promise had looked a bit shabby of late. But it had been given a new coat of paint and was in pristine condition for the visit of Opposition leaders, with Mr Ahern announcing confidently that the Bill setting up the body would be published in autumn.
The Taoiseach's confidence was not shaken even when two of the inspectors - Pat Rabbitte and Trevor Sargent - mentioned his 1998 role in opening the Leas Cross Nursing Home, where the abuses detailed in the RTÉ programme took place. This was a little unfair on Mr Ahern, who has opened everything from envelopes to off-licences during his years as Taoiseach. He could hardly have missed something as big as a nursing home.
Besides, as he pointed out, the home wasn't that big at the time: it had had several new "extensions" in the intervening years and "I haven't been out inspecting the standards every day since". Fine Gael's Bernard Allen wanted to know who opened the extensions. "GV Wright?" suggested his party colleague, Fergus O'Dowd, who apparently has a file of Freedom of Information Act requests "a foot thick" on the subject of nursing homes.
One item in that file showed that the then junior minister responsible for the elderly had been aware of an allegation of similar mistreatment involving a patient in a Co Dublin nursing home early last year, but had treated it as a constituency matter and - according to Enda Kenny - "abandoned his ministerial responsibilities". The junior minister in question was Ivor Callely, the mere mention of whose name brought groans from the Opposition. Jim O'Keeffe groaned loudest: "Him again!"
It seemed harsh to hang the latest crisis in the health sector on Ivor's narrow shoulders. But the suggestion that a problem involving residential care of the elderly being ignored in official circles had a depressingly familiar ring to it.