As the departmental and judicial tribunals, all dozen of them, meander along and get bogged down in legal argument, the Dail Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has not only been forging ahead, but is set to expand operations. Indeed Jim Mitchell's body is getting such large new quarters that there is talk of a Starr chamber being established. Miscreants will be wary and witnesses will quake.
As a backbencher, Mitchell occupied the customary office on the second or Fine Gael floor of Leinster House and as chairman of the PAC was given an additional adjoining office. As the work of the committee gathered pace, his quarters got overcrowded and this week under cover of darkness and with the connivance of the Oireachtas authorities, Mitchell moved from Leinster House across the road to Kildare House where, instead of two rooms, he has seven. He has been given the suite of offices just inside the door, including the hearing room, where media and TV fixtures will be a permanent feature, three waiting rooms for the witnesses and a press room. Upstairs on the first floor he has his constituency and committee offices. The chairman wanted them all together - private office, administration and hearing - and he got this.
These, probably unprecedented, facilities for a committee indicates both the seriousness with which the House takes the PAC's work in examining public spending and irregularities in the financial system as they impinge on the public purse, and Mitchell's determination to pursue his mission. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has said "the Government will help the committee in its work in any way possible", and so it appears. The committee is obviously stepping up operations and in the New Year will call witnesses central to the AIB/DIRT affair. It also hopes to establish sub committees and is seeking changes to its terms of references and increased powers for itself and for the comptroller and auditor general to investigate whether or not an amnesty was given to AIB by the Revenue Commissioners in 1991.
Poppy power
This time every year the poppy raises its pretty head. Armistice Day is Wednesday and the President, Mrs McAleese will be in Flanders with Queen Elizabeth of England and King Albert and Queen Paola of Belgium to inaugurate the Peace Tower at Messines dedicated to those from the island of Ireland who fought and died in the first World War. She won't be wearing a poppy. The Minister accompanying her, Liz O'Donnell, says she will. An Aras spokesperson said when the matter arose last year, she was inaugurated on Poppy Day, the President decided she would abandon all emblems apart from the shamrock once a year. Those responsible for the Messines project, where the 36th Ulster and the 16th Irish Divisions fought side-by-side, are former FG deputy Paddy Harte and ex-UDA man Glen Barr.
In Flanders for the weekend ceremonies will be FF deputy Michael O'Kennedy, co-chair of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. He especially wished to go, he says because the uncle after whom he was named fought in the first World War, found his way home to Tipperary in 1916 and was killed in the War of Independence. His own father was in a Belfast jail in that war, stayed on to work in the woollen trade and O'Kennedy remembers many Northern Protestants calling on the family when he moved South. O'Kennedy, now back at the Bar, was recently elected a bencher of the King's Inns and had his benchers dinner last night.
Poppies are banned in the chamber of Leinster House, as are all emblems bar the aine, fainne, the pioneer pin and the white peace ribbon. One who will wear a poppy around the House this week is FG's Charlie Flanagan, who tomorrow lays the wreath at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial in Portlaoise to honour the dead of Queen's County. Last year Emmet Stagg, Brendan McGahon and Senator Mary Henry also sported poppies. But one great champion of the poppy, FG's Brian Hayes won't be here next week. He and FF colleague from the Environment Committee, Eoin Ryan, are off to Argentina for the conference on climate change and global warming.
A gun for Maginnis
The Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis has written to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, thanking him warmly for sending him a gun.
It's a huge coastal defence gun from Spike Island which was transported by low loader to Grey Point Fort on the Co Antrim coast. It is not commissioned, so is unlikely to do much damage even if pointed out to sea. Maginnis, an army man himself, is much concerned with the restoration of the fort and had the gun not been forthcoming from Cork, a replica would have been made.
On its way North the gun overnighted in Dundalk, where it is believed, it was decommissioned.
Making waves
One would have thought that those organising the capital's millennium projects would keep well away from the Liffey, and water in general, given the disaster of the Lottery's millennium clock. Not so. The Chime in the Slime was set below O'Connell Bridge to tick merrily away until 2000, but was removed in disgrace in August 1996 after less than six months because no one could see it. Now Mile Atha Cliath, the company set up with city representatives ranging from the Corporation to the banks and RTE to select millennium projects, has chosen ideas with a distinctly watery theme. And what's more, the presentation of their plans will take place on a boat on the Liffey.
Mile Atha Cliath announced this week that the Stena Challenger, which normally does the Holyhead run, will be the biggest ship ever to sail through the East Link Bridge when it moors at Sir John Rogerson's Quay for the Monday lunchtime presentation. Mile is a private partnership, choosing projects which "will improve the experience of living in Dublin or visiting Dublin and be dynamic, accessible and permanent and possibly growing in value and respect during the third millennium".
Half the funding is being sought from the Government's National Millennium Committee, under chief whip Seamus Brennan, and half from the private sector and local authority. The chief executive, Dorothy Barry, won't say what's in Monday's announcement but she anticipates controversy. A new foot-bridge, near the Ha'penny Bridge, and both a boardwalk and floodlights along the Liffey are on the cards.
Mile is not in the business of renovating O'Connell Street, or even organising parties. The new Nelson's Pillar is the Corporation's affair and the parties, naturally, are the responsibility of the Festivals Committee under the Minister for Recreation, James McDaid, when the millennium jollity starts next St Patrick's Day.
A bridge too far
At the Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting in Leinster House on Wednesday, the new Sports Council being set up by Minister James McDaid was discussed. Dramatically, a previously unknown lobby group raised its head. Three members argued that bridge be included. They want it recognised as a sport and eligible for funding. The Minister is looking into it.
And this from a party that espouses hurling, jiving at the crossroads, backstabbing, blackguarding and begrudgery. What would Micky Moran, who called intellectuals long-haired Trinity weirdos, say now?
Northern exposure
Nearly 100 members of the Northern Assembly arrived in Brussels this week to learn about Europe and how to be parliamentarians. They endured a heavy round of seminars, and Eurocrats impressed on them that they should forget the Westminster model (where government and opposition are forever at each other's throat), on the grounds that it didn't work over 50 years in the North, and look instead to the European Parliament where majorities and alliances are different on each vote. Assembly members were also on the look-out for know-how on drawing down funds, as they say in Europe, for their pet projects.
The members met the usual heavies, Commission President, Jacques Santer, Commissioners Pee Flynn and Monika Wulf Mathies and the EC Secretary General, Carlo Trojan. There was an unfortunate run-in between Sinn Fein delegates and Carl O'Trojan, as the Irish call him because of his work for the peace process, when the Shinners got mad at his inability to understand Irish. The Dutchman is a well-known linguist with five or six languages under this belt; how many do they speak?
There was some r and r, but it was hardly a laugh judging by the jokes they had to applaud. At dinner in the Hilton on Tuesday the host Jim Dougall, once of RTE, now head of the EC's Belfast office, told the one about the businessman at Belfast Airport checking in three bags. "That's for New York, that's for London, and that's for Paris," he said. "But your ticket says Manchester. We can't send your luggage elsewhere," he was told. "You did last week," he retorted.
The Transport Commissioner, Neil Kinnock, told of how as a young politician he had been asked to speak in Merthyr Tydfil with veteran Woy Jenkins. At dinner he claims to have heard the said bon viveur asking a bewildered waitress if they had any asparagus tips. "'Fraid not sir," she replied, "would Benson and Hedges do?"
Northern Secretary, Mo Mowlam, described her difficulty in picking a suitable formal dress for a big do in Belfast City Hall. Wandering nervously among the impeccably garbed guests, she ran into a "senior Northern politician", whom she didn't name, in distinctly casual wear who greeted her with the words "at least someone else knew it wasn't formal". Northern humour is black and wonderful. They deserve better than this.
Dail Guardian
Pilferers in Leinster House? Surely not, with all those gardai around. Green TD John Gormley has written to Deputy Ben Briscoe, chairman of the House Services Committee, urging that something be done about the disappearance of newspapers from the library. Since entry is restricted to past and present members of the Oireachtas, the culprits can be none other than our parliamentarians - and the librarians are exasperated to say the least. Gormley says Irish papers rarely vanish, presumably because members buy them for themselves, if only to read the death columns. Surprisingly, the most inclined to walk, he says, is the 50p Guardian, that politically correct organ of New Labour.
Gormley suggests tags, to set off an alarm as the paper crosses the library threshold. Quidnunc thinks a dye that activates at the door might be appropriate so that she can identify the culprits herself.
Hands across the water
Some 20 MPs turned up at a committee room in the House of Commons on Tuesday for a reception to launch the Irish in Britain Parliamentary Group which holds its first meeting on December 2nd. Cross-party and not governmentlinked, it is the brainchild of the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, John McDonnell.
The group, which wants to create awareness of Irish issues in Britain, believes that about 50 MPs have an Irish background - including Kevin McNamara, Siobhan McDonagh, and Chris Mullin - and many more have an interest in Ireland, such as Ken Livingston, Labour whip, Jim Dowd and Helen Jackson, parliamentary secretary to Mo Mowlam. Many were there on Tuesday.
The Irish Ambassador, Ted Barrington, a guest, told the MPs and members of the Irish community of the crucial role played in the last year by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, David Andrews and Mo Mowlam, and paid tribute to the contribution the Irish had made to civic society in Britain - in politics, teaching and the unions - over the years. He said that notwithstanding our current prosperity and close relations, the elderly and new immigrants were still in need of assistance, and he welcomed the new group.