Rabbitte puts McDowell in pole position

Dail Sketch: Like a dog with a bone, Pat Rabbitte will not leave the State's indemnity for the religious communities alone.

Dail Sketch: Like a dog with a bone, Pat Rabbitte will not leave the State's indemnity for the religious communities alone.

And like a dog chasing a cat, he continues to bark up the lamppost which he insists the then attorney general was climbing when the "shameful, secret, negligent, fraudulent" deal was done.

In the Labour leader's imagination, Mr McDowell is still up there, and he's not letting him down. The real target is the Government's majority party, of course. But so damaging is the image of the Minister for Justice up the lamppost that yesterday saw a fire brigade exercise by the Government to rescue him.

Mr McDowell initiated the campaign himself, but it was taken up manfully by the Taoiseach, who paid the sort of compliments to a Minister for which death is normally a prerequisite.

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Among the eulogies, Mr Ahern said Mr McDowell had been a "conscientious" and "first class" attorney general who had shown "extraordinary commitment to public service". It was a "sad day" to hear members "degrade" the chamber with charges against him, and it was an "unworthy suggestion" to suggest that Mr McDowell had been too busy campaigning when, on the contrary, he was always completely "on top of his brief".

That was the cue for Mr Rabbitte who, before you could say "down boy!" was barking again. "Not only was the attorney general not on top of his brief - he was on top of a pole," he snapped, thwarting the fire brigade's work. This was too much for Mr McDowell, who complained across the Dáil floor about a "cheap, unworthy jibe".

Whatever about the jibe, the indemnity is unlikely to be cheap. And the Labour leader has calculated that this is an issue with which he can pin financial negligence on the Government. So much so that, escalating Tuesday's row over whether the deal had ever been debated in the Dáil, he suggested yesterday that the Taoiseach "calculatedly and deliberately lied" in suggesting it had.

There followed the well-worn procedure in which the Ceann Comhairle demands that the word be withdrawn, and the perpetrator reluctantly agrees. Mr Rabbitte first offered to return to his position that the Taoiseach had merely "misled" the house, then suggested substituting the phrase "guilty of telling an untruth", before mounting a fighting retreat: "I withdraw it. It is a rose by any other name." Thus Mr Rabbitte completed his climbdown; whether he will allow Mr McDowell to climb down after him remains to be seen.

The smoking controversy continued to smoulder yesterday, after Tuesday's Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting. But in reply to a question from Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach insisted the ban would go ahead.

There was "consensus within the international scientific community" on the negative effects of environmental tobacco smoke, he added.

Mr Kenny suggested that Fianna Fáil remained divided.

There was no gainsaying this, so Mr Ahern just repeated himself. Despite the warnings of the Flat Earth Society, he and first mate Martin would continue to sail west, and hope they're not wrong.