Dail Sketch/Michael O'Regan: Bertie Ahern was upbeat. They could not have been more supportive, he declared. But the Taoiseach was not speaking about his meeting and dinner with his parliamentary party colleagues on Monday.
They had dined on wild mushroom soup and beef. And it had gone down well, even if the recent election caused stomach pains to deputies in marginal seats. "It might have been a last supper for some of us," said a backbencher, musing on the issue in the corridor.
With the backdrop of near empty back benches, Mr Ahern was insisting at Question Time that he had enough support from his European colleagues to secure the job of Commission president. His assertion that the job was his, had he wanted it, was challenged by Fine Gael's Enda Kenny and Labour's Pat Rabbitte. In fact, said Mr Ahern, the negotiator and leader of Mr Kenny's EPP group had put considerable pressure on him.
Socialist Party TD, Joe Higgins was scathing about the Taoiseach's "organising" of the job for Jose Manuel Durão Barroso. He was, said Mr Higgins, "an extreme, right-wing, neo-liberal politician whose main distinction was to have led an attack of so-called austerity on the Portuguese working class".
He asked Mr Ahern if the Irish people, or indeed the Taoiseach's predecessors, would have been satisfied in 1920 if "the imperial power of Britain had hand-picked some castle Catholics and a few spies from around the empire, called them a government and put them in charge here with the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries".
A visibly irritated Mr Ahern replied: "The deputy will tell the House some day what he is for and give members a shock." Later, he was confronted with domestic matters, including the break-up of Aer Rianta. But that was after he had answered 54 questions on his EU presidency.
When Enda Kenny took exception to him answering them all together, Mr Ahern insisted that it would have taken until September or October to deal with them individually.
These will be critical months as the Cabinet reshuffle is announced. Who will have the celebratory wild mushroom soup and beef, and who will have to eat humble pie on that fateful day? Only the former president of Europe knows.