Dáil Sketch/Frank McNally: Fresh from a visit to Zagreb, the Taoiseach was well placed to allay Opposition fears that the Government was turning Ireland into a low-wage economy.
So high was even the minimum wage here, he told the House, that "in Croatia, they wonder how we can run a country". Few Croats could aspire to €7.65 an hour and Ireland seemed "very attractive" to them, he added.
We can only hope he didn't tell his hosts about Ivor Callely's join-the-civil-service-and- win-a-car scheme, or soon there'll be nobody left in the Balkans.
But just in case, Pat Rabbitte restored some balance to Hiberno-Croat relations by suggesting the plus points were not all on one side. If the folks in Zagreb were pleasantly surprised at Ireland's minimum wage, he said, Irish workers might be equally charmed by "the price of a bale of briquettes or a bag of coal in Croatia".
The Taoiseach wisely ignored this argument, no doubt aware that you can't buy peat briquettes at any price in the Balkans, and that Mr Rabbitte had inadvertently advertised yet another of Ireland's attractions.
The debate arose in the context of the crisis at Irish Ferries. And it was in the same context that Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin asked Mr Ahern if he would echo the Ictu's call for workers to join Friday's mass protest in Dublin. To which the Taoiseach replied jesuitically that, while he understood the Ictu's frustrations: "Friday is a working day and it continues to be a working day."
If 100,000 people turn out, Mr Ahern has left enough wriggle room there to claim afterwards that they were marching in support of Government policy. He famously said this of the Iraq war demo. But nearly three years on, with Shannon airport the focus of renewed controversy over the US practice of exporting prisoners for "enhanced interrogation", the Labour leader was struggling to remember what that Government policy was.
Despite subjecting the Taoiseach to weeks of unenhanced interrogation on the eve of war, Mr Rabbitte said the Opposition had never quite learned where the Government stood. Maybe Mr Ahern knew now, he suggested. But when the Taoiseach told him that Ireland was opposed to the transit of prisoners for torture and had been assured by the White House that Shannon was not being used for this, Joe Higgins was beside himself. It was "quite incredible", he said, that the Government would accept the assurances of the same US state secretary who was central to the "monstrous concoction . . . on which the war was launched".
Micheál Martin faced question-time, too, yesterday and was pressed, among other things, on the Prime Time investigation into price-fixing among car dealerships. The Minister neglected to mention Mr Callely's attempt to introduce competition into this area. But his modesty was corrected when he claimed that Fianna Fáil had always been a party for workers' rights. Labour's Brendan Howlin could only agree: "You're offering them cars and everything," he said, for all the world, including Croatia, to hear.