Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney will continue to fight tooth-and-nail to ensure that Ahern isn't forced to answer questions in the Dáil about Ray Burke's appointment and resignation and Ahern's part in it. Not, at any rate, the questions which the Opposition, the public and the media want answered, writes Dick Walsh.
Nor will the unanswered questions be confined to the Burke affair: when a government settles in behind a protective thicket to ward off those whom it considers intruders, the resistance spreads.
Eventually, marshalled behind the thicket, the Opposition, the media and the public are prevented from doing anything more than passing the time of day with the Taoiseach.
This is ridiculous. The Dáil has just resumed more than four months after the general election. With a couple of breaks to steady the nerves of its supporters, the Government has been all but invisible since May.
In the current session it must deal with Nice, however the referendum turns out; with unemployment, which is rising at a dizzy rate; and with fallout from the election, which was disastrous even for Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats. They left office, as their cheerleaders in the Murdoch and O'Reilly newspapers kept reminding us, with one certainty: the economy was all that mattered, and the economy was in safe hands. It was all the electorate needed to know.
The Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalition returned after a showbusiness campaign - directed by P. J. Mara with guest appearances by Michael McDowell - with a sackful of unanswered and, thanks to a rattled Opposition and some timid journalism, unasked questions.
It isn't only Ahern who has been kept out of reach since the election. As report after report undermined the façade which he still described as the envy of Europe, Charlie McCreevy could be heard still cackling in the background about economic miracles.
Not so long ago he was assuring all and sundry that, when it came to statistics, his ministerial colleagues elsewhere in the EU were green with envy.
Ministerial colleagues in this State - especially those like Noel Dempsey and Micheál Martin, whose concerns are health and education - are closer to reality.
McCreevy must have begun to realise that the uncertainty among Government backbenchers, which was evident at their Killarney meeting and must be palpable in Leinster House this week, calls for attention - not when time and business permit but before it is too late.
Voices are raised in every quarter at present about the future of the European Union and our role in it. But this is not just one debate in which those who want to stay in the Union are ranged against those who oppose membership.
Several different debates are going on at once. Some are relevant to the referendum on Nice, some are not. Some have more to do with domestic affairs than with the Union; and the heat generated is largely unaffected by the distance from the main event.
WHEN structural funds or agricultural grants are at stake, both the turnout and the result are as predictable as any game of chance may be. When the outcome, as at present, brings no immediate benefit; when the debate is complicated by an old issue, neutrality, in a new setting after the Cold War; we are well advised to think it out again.
When we first looked to the European Community in the 1970s, we were influenced by the direction and content of the Common Market. And by the echoes in the title: it would be common, but not a community; a market but without the restraining influence of regulation.
Thirty years of development have changed the Community, its place in the world and our relationship to it.
Of course we cannot hope to regulate and develop our national community and its institutions if the Taoiseach and his Government refuse to comply with the civilising demands of openness and accountability.
The notion that questions can be satisfactorily answered and issues debated on the strength of po-faced statements has all but killed parlia-mentary debate on some major events.
Covering politics here, we have seen taoisigh and ministers return with boring regularity from European summit meetings at which important, invariably complicated and often controversial decisions have been taken.
But because of the form which the reports take, because of the language used to confuse the punters and protect their lazy or incompetent leaders, the decisions either bamboozle the public or are barely understood.
We have also heard chairmen say, with the clarity and force of a Feargus Flood or a Brian McCracken, that if questions with which they'd had to grapple for months or years had been answered in the Oireachtas in the first place everyone would have been saved time and trouble.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie