PD watchdog fails to bark despite pressing invitations

It wasn't the most exciting Dail debate in living memory, but you'd never have known it from Brian Cowen.

By the time the Opposition leaders summed up, the Minister for Health was spoiling for a fight. He called John Bruton "the Inspector Clouseau of Irish politics", as the Fine Gael leader, looking reasonably panther-like if not exactly pink, stalked Fianna Fail for what he said was its persistent inability to ask awkward questions of its errant members.

When this didn't provoke Mr Bruton, the Minister barked "Fool! Fool!" across the chamber floor, adding "Clown!" for good measure before a still-unruffled Fine Gael leader sat down.

Then Mr Cowen turned his attention to Ruairi Quinn, setting about him like a dog after a postman. When the Labour leader first sought to draw conclusions from Mary Harney's early departure from the chamber, Mr Cowen immediately jumped all over him, saying she had a funeral to attend and snapping: "Don't be attaching significance to people leaving the House".

He continued in the same vein, repeatedly finishing Mr Quinn's sentences; and so dogged were the interruptions that the Labour leader, overrunning his allotted five minutes, was eventually forced to appeal to the Ceann Comhairle for "injury time".

It's just as well there were no real injuries in the chamber yesterday. Hospital waiting lists had been the subject of earlier heated exchanges with the Opposition, and this could be the only explanation for Mr Cowen's bad mood. Certainly, there was little in yesterday's main debate for him to get worked up about.

The Dail resumed as it had risen before Christmas, with the Taoiseach in the dock. But as he had done when explaining the role of his brother-in-law in the Haughey tax controversy, Mr Ahern delivered a flawless performance; admitting human frailty but looking Opposition members in the eye and daring them to call him dishonest.

Political opponents were wont to "construct an edifice out of circumstantial and often irrelevant points of detail", Mr Ahern warned. He may have had a gallows-type edifice in mind, because be went on to insist that correcting earlier answers on the basis of new information was not a "hanging offence".

He repeated his revised account of meetings with Tom Gilmartin. He repeated he had never asked Mr Gilmartin for money. He saw it as "frankly . . . ridiculous to claim that putting further information into the public arena reflects on my credibility - it is the action of an honest person".

He hit hard when he needed to, taking a clear swipe at the former Democratic Left leader when he said: "Neither I nor my party have been in the habit of systematically destroying records". And he feinted when it was called for, achieving the understatement of the debate when he said Mr Gilmartin had initially impressed him as a man who "might do a few things".

If the Opposition had constructed a gallows for the Taoiseach yesterday, it became obvious as the debate wore on that they were depending on Mr Ahern to bring his own trapdoor.

The trapdoor, like everything else, hinged on the PDs. But despite unprecedented generosity from the Opposition, whose offers to share speaking time with the junior Government partner were politely declined by Mary Harney, the PD watchdog neither barked nor wagged its tail throughout the debate.