Almost 20 years ago a young ambitious minister for justice from Limerick, Michael Noonan, decided to open the files on his predecessor. The effect was to explode the future ministerial aspirations of one Sean Doherty.
Twenty years later Doherty, his image much refurbished by his workmanlike performance as a member of the DIRT inquiry, is expected to preside over an inquiry affecting the party Noonan now leads.
To complete the ironic circle, the inquiry is being sought by another former justice minister, Des O'Malley. For different reasons, O'Malley's personal relationship with the other two is somewhat brittle.
If the latest inquiry gets off the ground, yet another former justice minister, Jim Mitchell, who, at the material time was a consultant to Esat but who has said he knows nothing of the latest controversy, is likely to be called as a witness.
The saga of the unwanted $50,000 donation (IR£33,000) floating around as unwelcome as a Carlisle lamb, as Joe Higgins memorably described it, has thrown Fine Gael into some disarray and has provided a gleeful hiccup in an otherwise bad month for the Government partners.
Fianna Fail members can't contain their relief at Noonan's and Fine Gael's discomfort but have kept their heads down and left the public running in the main to eager PDs, of the current and former variety.
Martin Cullen, now more Fianna Fail than Fianna Fail themselves, is adamant that Fine Gael was under a "moral imperative" to report the unconsummated transaction to the Moriarty tribunal. Moral imperatives are either strangely divisible in the former PD man's mind or else he moves around his adopted party blindfolded and wearing ear muffs. But then, as he told Albert Reynolds outside Arasde Valera on the day he deserted the PDs: "Taoiseach, this is a great day for me."
Cullen's former colleague Bobby Molloy took up the running on Morning Ireland and he either knows an awful lot or nothing at all. In fact, as he searched around for stones to throw, Drapier couldn't fail to hear echoes of the charges he proffered against Jimmy Tully.
Will Bobby Molloy risk having his charges examined by another tribunal? In the process, he made no mention of the recent acceptance by the PDs of £50,000 from Denis O'Brien. Michael Noonan decided to take it on the chin on the order of business.
Dermot Ahern, who returned triumphant from London in 1997 to give Ray Burke the allclear, thought the Fine Gael leader should be ashamed to show his face. Noonan ploughed on and to some effect. Conor Lenihan was one of the incidental casualties. Was deputy Lenihan's intervention for the purpose of making a statement about his double-jobbing with Esat? End of heckling from that quarter.
Ruairi Quinn decided to make hay while the sun shone. Last year Labour won acceptance at second stage for a Bill to ban corporate donations but the Bill never reached committee stage due to an arrangement between Noel Dempsey and Jackie Healy-Rae. Fianna Fail's glee would be short lived, Quinn predicted.
The latest fallout was only the logical suspicion that now attaches to corporate donations. He tore into an increasingly abashed Bertie Ahern, who dodged and weaved and lamely reinvited the Labour Party into an all-party committee to discuss unspecified constitutional difficulties that surround the banning of corporate donations.
Here many colleagues detect the invisible hand of yet another PD deserter, this time the Attorney-General, Michael McDowell. McDowell has always been ideologically opposed to the public funding of politics and several colleagues in all parties now suspect he is intellectually shoring up the position of the Taoiseach.
Notwithstanding his own convictions, there was a time when McDowell would have recognised the disproportionate political advantage to Fianna Fail of being able to retain huge business funding in order to maintain the party's dominant position. Quinn is probably correct in that he senses the death knell of the traditional cosy arrangement between business and politics.
Fianna Fail may laugh this weekend at the Fine Gael debacle - but it is hollow laughter as their own focus groups are feeding back. The hapless Noel Dempsey was put through the wringer on the issue by Eamon Gilmore on Labour's private members' time. The next day on national radio he refused to say he wanted corporate donations to continue and retreated to safety behind "the Government line".
Even Fianna Fail is no longer united behind the Bertie Ahern position and as one Fianna Fail wag put it: "Sure only for Mary Harney we would stop corporate donations." Bertie's main focus seems to be to seduce Labour into an all-party committee and remove the issue from parliamentary exchanges.
But Ruairi Quinn clearly believes that, once in, there will be no way out of Bertie's parlour. Quinn is on strong ground when he argues that private debate behind closed doors is unnecessary when there can be all-party public discussion.
Clearly fund-raisers for the Government parties have more substantial financial pledges than the other parties to be called in during the general election. But the issue won't go away between now and the election. Even if the pressure abates, it is likely to be ignited again by developments at Dublin Castle. When the smoke clears, the Fine Gael embarrassment is likely only to give a further impetus for cleaning up the political trade.
Little or no attention is paid to routine business in here, no matter how important. Even the Finance Bill in committee for three days scarcely attracted a passing glance. It can't go on like this - or can it?