Dáil Sketch:David Lloyd George said that negotiating with Eamon de Valera was like trying to pick up mercury with a fork. "Why doesn't he use a spoon?" de Valera queried. It's just as well Lloyd George never came up against Bertie Ahern.
Even if the entire Opposition arrived in the Dáil with enough spoons to play the Anvil Chorus, they still wouldn't manage to snare a straight answer from Bertie.
Unless he wanted to give it.
On the other hand, Dev would be proud of his successor, the man who hopes later this year to equal his record of serving three successive terms as Taoiseach.
There are always times when party leaders try to avoid answering difficult questions. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Bertie is peerless when it comes to talking around a question. He smothers issues with an outpouring of disjointed ramblings that his Opposition counterparts find impossible to unravel. It's a strange sort of brilliance. But Bertie's real genius lies in the way that, day after day, he gets away with it.
Yesterday, he delivered a master class in the art of avoidance. The technique, though cloaked in his stream of consciousness style, is simple enough. First, disregard the question and say what you want to say. Then go on the offensive. Finally, sit down leaving the impression you have fully answered the question and exposed a major Opposition defect in the process.
For an encore, watch your frustrated rivals with a beatific smile as they wonder whether to laugh or cry.
For Leaders' Questions, Enda Kenny came up with five simple posers for Bertie. Mistake one. It gives Bertie the opportunity to cherry-pick the easiest ones. Which is what he did.
Enda presented the Taoiseach with a series of promises made by his Government, and asked what had come of them.
Hospital waiting lists to end. Prison overcrowding to end. Primary school class size down to a set figure. A metro link to Dublin airport by 2007. An "absolutely secure" investment of €53 million in e-voting machines that would definitely be used.
Bertie muttered about the revolving door system. Secondary-school class sizes were much improved. He ignored health and transport. But he tackled the abandoned e-voting machines - without reference to the wasted millions.
This involved talking about pencils. He seems to have a phobia about pencils. He said Fine Gael want to go back to paper voting, even though the country has embraced technology and machines. "Everybody is using them for their bank cards, their pin cards and everything else," he said, heaping disdain on the Opposition for clinging to their pencils. Questions not answered, but the Taoiseach was happy. "Now, Ceann Comhairle, which one did I miss?" he grinned.
Enda tried again. Where had he delivered on the specific promises? Bertie jeered him for once calling for internet voting.
"I wanted voting machines. You wanted the internet. So don't blame me!"
"I do want to admit in the national house of parliament today that there was a delay on the M50. A van ran into a truck," sneered Bertie. "So I'm saying that a van ran into a truck and disrupted people. And I wasn't driving either. As soon as there was a delay, everything happened." Even his backbenchers looked baffled.