When the Minister for Public Enterprise, Mary O'Rourke, lobbied the EU transport ministers in Brussels on St Patrick's Day against the ending of duty-free sales, she promoted her cause and improved the atmosphere by presenting each minister - after the vote which supported her call for a new report - with a bottle of 12year-old Irish whiskey "in honour of the day that was in it". She won that round, but the war has since been lost.
While some marvelled at how the Minister and her small delegation had managed to buy quite so many duty-free bottles, the politically correct British Labour party viewed her efforts differently. A blatant attempt to bribe ministers, some said. An underhand effort to persuade the Council to reverse the decision to phase out duty free, said others. Now the matter is being raised in the European Parliament by MEP, Richard Corbett. He is demanding that all the ministers should donate the equivalent in value to a bottle of 12year-old duty-free Irish whiskey to an appropriate charity.
Corbett, Labour vice-president of the Parliament's institutional affairs committee, complains that MEPs are now subject to a strict code of conduct in relation to gifts, but ministers suffer no such constraints. "Parliament and Council jointly exercise legislative and budgetary power in the EU. Only Parliament has put its house in order."
Quidnunc wonders was Bertie Ahern told about all this so-called bribery and carousing and will there be a judicial inquiry?