At the end of Padraig Flynn's performance on that now famous Late Late Show, my husband summed it up in two words: "Bloody eejit."
But then, John Quinn hasn't worked closely with Padraig Flynn. Not only have I worked closely with him, I have fought with him, hated him, admired him, been irritated by him and liked him. The man on The Late Late Show would never have provoked that multiplicity of reactions, because the man on TV was performing a crude parody: Cute Counthry Hoor.
It is a parody the man has used for years, with malice aforethought. It first of all serves as a litmus test of the people he encounters. He sends out this parody, and if they're stupid enough to think it sums up the man, he has their measure. It also enables him to be incredibly gregarious without letting anybody get close to him.
Behind the Cute Counthry Hoor performance, Flynn is a clever man who can do the workload of 10. When he chooses to switch it off, he can be a sophisticated negotiator and a persuasive talker. Not only did he not switch it off on The Late Late Show, he cranked it up to a volume even his old colleagues rarely had experienced.
Watching, I was reminded of the first time C.J. Haughey sent a group of front-benchers to Carr Communications to see what it was that company did.
For Flynn, the two days were devastating. I remember Tom Savage cutting through the overweening talk coming from the Castlebar man and telling him he was "a verbal terrorist" and that he, Savage, was having none of it.
Analysis of his talks and interviews on videotape left him in no doubt that he had a choice to make: back-of-the-lorry bluster or a communications style that reflected his real intelligence. I found the course very tough - I have said publicly that it was akin to being gutted. If I had been told what P. Flynn was told, I would have walked out of the place and never spoken to any of them again.
Instead, Flynn went back to Haughey and told him the entire party had to go through the process and announced to anyone who would listen that he was going to try to act on what he had been told.
Certainly, in the ensuing years, Flynn developed a more nuanced approach, not just to communications, but to his own career planning. On the one hand, when a small - very small - number of ministers realised we could no longer, in good conscience, serve the then Taoiseach, Padraig Flynn had the courage to go to the back benches, although he was convinced that, as one of the oldest of us, the move would write finis to his political career.
On the other hand, when he decided he wanted the European Commissionership, he went after it in a way that left track marks on several faces, including mine.
One of the problems he encountered in his European role was a version of what most politicians suffer from: lack of appreciation. Voters are interested only in what you're going to do for them tomorrow, not what you achieved for them yesterday. Irish voters don't care much about Europe, except where grants are forthcoming or regulations affect the way they do their job.
MEPs complain constantly about lack of coverage in Irish media, and Tommie Gorman always looks to me as if he's worn to a thread trying to make European stories interesting to the Irish public. As a result of our fuzzy focus on things European, if you asked 1,000 people why Commissioner Flynn was awarded a major honour from the respiratory surgeons throughout Europe, they would look at you blankly: his relentless moves against the tobacco industry simply have not registered in this State.
Similarly, his moves to prevent the exploitation of workers, which have earned him the nickname "Red P" in Europe, have gone largely unnoticed by workers in Ireland. Relatively few people have followed his development into an impressive performer on the European stage. For many, he is still locked in memory as an archetypal county councillor on the make.
It may be that this lack of appreciation for his genuine achievements was what drove Padraig Flynn into a) going on The Late Late Show, and b) going into a mad overdrive on that programme. If he had not made the comment about Mr Gilmartin and his wife being ill and out of sorts, and if he had not over-elaborated his answers to questions about the £50,000 cheque, the programme might have evoked an audience response along the lines of "a bit OTT, but he's a hell of a character, all the same". Instead, this one broadcast has served to confirm the prejudices of everyone who ever loathed him, to diminish him to a caricature of himself.
The tragedy of it is that the in-your-face effrontery of the man, demonstrated in his comments about his three homes, can be tolerable, even funny, if juxtaposed with other aspects of his personality. Yet for some reason he chose, on this programme, to give us in-your-face effrontery and nothing else. I cannot believe he decided in advance to fill a half an hour with boastful claims: it may have happened because of a complete misreading of the studio audience.
Politicians too often blame their misfortunes on the media. In this instance, the media, as represented by Gay Byrne, seemed to be setting out to provide something of a corrective to the widely-held view of the man. What struck me most forcefully is how the Commissioner single-handedly managed to make viewers forget the truth of Gay Byrne's introduction:
"My first guest makes decisions that not only affect every man, woman and child in this country, but also 360 million citizens of the European Community. He controls an annual budget of £9 billion. Is one of the most influential politicians in Europe, which is not bad for a former teacher from Castlebar, who started off in politics around 1960, giving the usual speeches on the back of a lorry outside church gates. And he carries, I think he carries his immense responsibilities with great dignity and great aplomb and, indeed, a great sense of humour, because he's always on for a laugh."
Before the show I would have bet on Flynn's reappointment as Commissioner.
Now it looks as if that is an impossibility. That certainly is the assumption being made, as speculation has got under way as to who will succeed him. Potentially spurious as it might be, it was interesting to read and listen to the speculation during the week.
I'm sure some of those who have been mentioned are flattered, despite the fact there is as yet no vacancy. I'm also sure it is never helpful when one is a candidate for one position to be then openly speculated about for a different position; no doubt Gerry Collins's competitors in the European elections in Munster will not be slow in explaining that a vote for Gerry is a waste, in that he's going to be the new Commissioner.