Dail Sketch/Frank McNally: The Opposition was accidentally unanimous about the issue of the day.
Accidentally because, on the one-topic-each Leaders Questions, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin wanted to ask about something other than "the sorry state" of the electoral register, as Enda Kenny had put it. But first he had to address a "slur" made against Sinn Féin by the Fine Gael leader.
But his preamble took so long that when he tried to switch to his intended topic, the Ceann Comhairle wouldn't let him. Dr O'Hanlon ruled that, like a golfer with the yips who unintentionally moves his ball, the Sinn Féin man had made full contact with the electoral register issue, so it counted as his question. To say Mr Ó Caoláin became outraged would be an understatement, because he was outraged to begin with. Enda Kenny had mentioned no names when saying a certain Dáil party was guilty of "wholesale" voter fraud. But there was no mistaking his implication that SF drew strong support from the key "deceased" section of the electorate. He implied this while pointing out that along with another category of voter - the relocated - the faithful departed now contributed to a situation where up to 800,000 people were wrongly registered.
With added sarcasm, Pat Rabbitte congratulated the Government on making the 1916 proclamation a reality, by giving the "dead generations" such a big say in the running of the country.
But the Taoiseach was as worried as everyone else about the potential for fraud. Giving a new twist to the term "social housing", he said his constituency contained four-bedroom homes in which up to 80 people were registered to vote. "There was an extraordinary turn-out in some of those houses in the last general election," he recalled.
The vital question, everybody agreed, was what to do about it. The only solution, suggested the Taoiseach, was "Shanks's mare": enumerators would have to call door-to-door and update the register the hard way. It would be a "September-October job".
Pat Rabbitte wanted to know how Shanks's mare would deal with such obstacles as gated communities, although he also regretted the exercise would deprive the public of an autumn general election. Not everyone in his party was so impatient. When Dr O'Hanlon sought to curtail the Labour leader's follow-up questions, Ruairí Quinn quipped: "It's all right for you. You don't have to stand for re-election."
There was the rub for Caoimhghín "Two Questions" Ó Caoláin. No wonder he was so bitter at his constituency colleague's "unfair, irrational ruling". While the rest of the House would travel to the next Dáil by Shanks's mare (if at all), Dr O'Hanlon would be on the pig's back, assured of automatic re-election without the horrors of facing the Cavan-Monaghan electorate, living and dead.