It was all hands to the pumps in the Department of Justice this week as officials sought to provide buoyancy for their Minister who, on the previous Thursday, had been holed below the waterline in the Dail.
In one of the worst ministerial performances in recent years, John O'Donoghue had gone before his peers and pleaded ignorance on a series of issues involving the detention and release of five men in connection with a huge cannabis haul in Dublin.
There was nothing shamefaced about the performance; no question of an apology for not knowing the required answers. Instead, the Dail was treated to a stream of bluff and bluster, with the Minister on one occasion complaining he had not been given notice of a specific question by the opposition.
Was this the man who, in 1995 and 1996, had emerged as the flail for wrongdoers and the scourge of Nora Owen? The man who had requested the Minister for Justice to "consider her position" at least once a month, as he excoriated the quality of her administrative control and the anti-crime performance of her underlings? The man who gave meaning to "zero tolerance" in the Dail?
Mr O'Donoghue was a changed politician. Given six hours' notice, he came to the Dail without knowledge of when the Garda realised the detention orders were faulty. He didn't know the State was not legally represented in court. He didn't know details of the nomination procedure used under the Criminal Justice (Drug Trafficking) Act. He was certain of only one thing: no blame rested with him.
The opposition, the Minister said, was persisting in the absurd notion that it was the Garda which made these decisions. They were made by the judiciary.
It was as close as Mr O'Donoghue got to directly blaming the various judges for the fiasco. It wasn't for him to apportion blame, he said, and it would be wrong for a minister to blame the judiciary.
That may be so, but by the time Mr O'Donoghue returned to the Dail last Tuesday, he had sufficient material to divert attention away from the gardai, from himself and from his Department officials.
The Minister disclosed that Judge Windle had signed detention orders when he was not entitled to do so. He found no record that the President of the District Court had written to his Department or to the Garda authorities advising them of the correctly nominated judges. And he claimed Judge Early would have ordered the release of the men anyway, in the absence of Judge Windle's error and the unlawful detention of the accused men.
It was arguing from the general to the specific. And the Minister was still passing the buck. Because he had no statutory obligation under the Criminal Justice (Drugs Trafficking) Act to advise the Garda of the names of district justices entitled to sign detention orders, he disclaimed all responsibility for ensuring the proper administration of the law.
With a mixture of courtroom bravado and long-winded justifications, the Minister kept his critics at bay. It was only when Pat Rabbitte taunted him with having become "a creature of his Department" that the Minister was stung into an indiscretion.
He assured the man from Democratic Left that he was "very much in charge of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Deputies should make no mistake about that", Mr O'Donoghue declared.
Given the nature of the Department and the inevitability of future cock-ups, it was an assertion that will surely return to haunt him.