There's no such thing as a free lunch, as we all know. But Liam Lawlor came close to achieving one yesterday when the High Court allowed him travel from Mountjoy prison to the Dáil to oppose a motion calling on him to resign, writes Frank McNally.
The debate was fixed for High Noon, a fact the Dublin West TD will have considered appropriate. Only the suspense was missing as, like a warped version of Gary Cooper's lawman, he faced a hostile all-party motion alone. In fact, the nearest thing Mr Lawlor had to an ally was another TD from Dublin's wild west, Joe Higgins.
Not that the Socialist Party TD didn't support the motion - he did - but he was less in favour of a High Noon-style confrontation than a Gunfight at the OK Corral. Recalling the land rezonings in Dublin County Council during the 1980s and '90s, he claimed the business would have put the "Dingle Horse Fair" of his Kerry youth to shame. "Liam Lawlor did not act in a vacuum," he said.
Far from a vacuum, there was no shortage of air, not to mention clear daylight, surrounding the latter during his Dáil visit. A few TDs, including Fianna Fáil's Liam Aylward and Labour's Sean Ryan, shook his hand. But apart from a cup of tea in the superintendent's office, there the hospitality ended.
The Taoiseach led the calls for his resignation, saying he had "let down politics," while an angry Michael Noonan complained that the "young people of Ireland are looking at us in contempt". This might have been literally true: the public gallery was packed with students from a school in Arklow, whose special outing had coincided with Mr Lawlor's. But their expressions were more bemused than contemptuous, it seemed.
The man on the receiving end of the motion was last on his feet. Betraying few signs of pressure, moral or otherwise, he delivered a detailed defence of his legal strategy. All sweetness and a kind of reason, he praised the judge who jailed him, and even excused the Opposition for doing what it had to do. Only the tribunal's lawyers - "slieveens" he called them - came in for criticism.
His speech from the dock lasted 20 minutes, and could be summed up thus: when the Flood tribunal report takes its place among the publications of the earth, then and only then should his political epitaph be written.
Out in the car-park, a State car accompanying the visit to Leinster House of the Ethiopian Prime Minister sat a few places away from the silver Fiat prison van that awaited another guest of the nation.