An Irishman's Diary

One vital detail of Tuesday's Dáil debate on payments to the Taoiseach has not attracted the attention it deserves. This was understandable, given the other issues involved. But now that the dust has settled, perhaps Pat Rabbitte would like to reconsider the comments in which - while being broadcast live on RTÉ in the middle of the afternoon - he cast doubt on the existence of the tooth fairy.

I watched the debate at home, where the tooth fairy has been a regular visitor in recent months. The visits - and the resultant donations - have been a great consolation to my daughter at a time during which her smile has come to resemble Shane McGowan's. The upside of her serial tooth loss is that she's saving money at the rate of an early-1990s Minister for Finance, and hopes to have enough for a new bike before the fairy payment scheme ends.

It's the mercy of God that she was at Irish dancing class on Tuesday when her benefactor was publicly derided by a TV character appearing in a time-slot normally associated with Mr Bean or Bear in the Big Blue House. His words could have set off a train of unwelcome questions, as my daughter followed the money trail to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. A child's innocence could have been prematurely ended, there and then.

Other parents will not have been so lucky. I suspect the Labour leader's words caused awkward moments in living-rooms all across Ireland. It must have been like a scene from Wallace & Gromit's Revenge of the Were-Rabbitte, in which a giant crazed bunny goes on the rampage in suburbia, bounding from garden to garden and leaving only destruction in his wake.

Perhaps Mr Rabbitte will now take the first opportunity to correct the record of the House and apologise. He was clearly ill-advised when he equated belief in the tooth fairy with the cult of Manchester businessmen attending functions to hear Irish finance ministers speak in a purely personal capacity. But he will need to sound a bit more contrite than the Taoiseach did in the Dáil. "Error of judgment" will not cut it with an audience of seven-year-olds, for all their notorious credulity.

The tooth fairy is the least defined of the figures of childhood myth, having no fixed image or, indeed, gender. Unlike Santa ("Ho, Ho, Ho"), s/he doesn't even have a catch-phrase. But the myth is no less enduring for that.

In some cultures, the fairy is a "mouse". According to an article on Wikipedia, this custom may or may not derive from a 18th-century French story La Bonne Petite Souris, in which a mouse turns into a fairy to help a good queen defeat an evil king by hiding under his pillow and knocking out his teeth. Creepily, it may also be related to an old superstition in which lost milk teeth were left to be eaten by mice and rats, in the belief that the child would acquire stronger, sharper (in short, rodent-like) teeth to replace them.

Modern treatments of the myth include Terry Pratchett's novel Hogfather, in which the tooth fairy subcontracts some of the work out to agents and carries pliers, for extracting extra teeth on the occasions when it can't give change. Like live Dáil broadcasts, that bit is probably best kept from the children.

At any rate, the practice of compensating for lost milk-teeth is now well established, and the payments appear to be inflation proof. A US woman who used to run a tooth fairy museum - now sadly defunct - researched dental values from 1900 to 1980 and calculated that they had tracked the consumer price index. I suspect they may be outstripping inflation now, at least in Ireland. It's not so long ago that the exchange rate was, to quote the Taoiseach, "quid per quo". It is more like five quid these days.

The downside of the various childhood myths in which parents conspire is the feeling of loss and betrayal that results when the truth finally dawns. Many people will forever remember the terrible day they first realised that their kids were cynically faking belief in Santa to preserve their parents' innocence (and get more presents). This loss of trust can be crushing for a sensitive adult.

I note from the text-books that my daughter is at the upper limit of the age when kids stop believing in the tooth fairy. It's possible she has already seen through the ruse and is just acting along for my sake (and the bike's).

But I'm not quite ready to face the truth yet. Our tooth fairy will continue to err on the side of caution, leaving money under the pillow for as long as possible.

He or she will do this in the hope that, soon, televised Dáil proceedings will be confined to the normal slot near midnight, where they belong.