The Dβil awakened this week from its summer hibernation, blinked nervously at a world on edge and took cover in a referendum on abortion. Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn't the Dβil that blinked; it was Bertie Ahern.
And he seems to have taken not only the Opposition but some of his Fianna Fβil colleagues by surprise.
For, by announcing the referendum when he did, on the eve of the resumption, he has chosen to make abortion the theme of the penultimate session of the current Dβil.
Why he did this hasn't been explained, but the Progressive Democrats have agreed to support him.
But the issue, even if it were limited to removing the threat of suicide as a reason for abortion, is bound to be complicated by legal and medical as well as political argument; and the time is short.
Its proponents should explain without delay why a third referendum on abortion should take precedence over a threat of violence on a more dangerous scale than the world has experienced for decades.
Or what makes it more urgent than an economy on the verge of recession, or more relevant than the fear of a deepening crisis in Northern Ireland?
The Labour Party raises the question of the protocol attached to the Maastricht Treaty which provides specifically that nothing should affect the application of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution in this State.
But, of course, this is the article which it's now proposed to amend.
Are our EU partners to be approached to request yet another protocol making yet another exception?
And are Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney to do the rounds of EU capitals explaining this fine new mess and its origins?
Will Ahern, McCreevy and Harney say that what they really want is to correct mistakes made in 1983, when political leaders gave way to one set of fundamentalists in the first place?
That they'll then get down to the problems presented by their own inability to take on another fundamentalist challenge after the Nice referendum?
If Bertie Ahern imagines that the coming campaign will have none of the bitterness of 1983 and none of the confusion of 1992, he's a slower learner - with a shorter memory - than even his harshest critics believed.
In 1983 old hands compared the referendum campaign with the elections of the early 1920s, which marked the start of civil war politics, or those of the early 1930s which scarred public life in this State for generations.
Members of families, neighbours and friends were set at each other's throats; some remained enemies for life.
The other day, on another mission, I happened to meet several of those who'd been through the 1983 campaign. To say that they were not looking forward to another bout of futile argument would be an insipid understatement.
More to the point, no one, of any party, could explain why it should be inflicted on the electorate when so much else remains undone. But, as the the ESRI and the Central Bank warn, unemployment is set to grow again.
Social advances, which ought to have accompanied the prosperity of the last five years, are about to be questioned, diminished or postponed.
The arguments about health, housing and education have switched from a discussion of our needs and how we are to pay for them to a series of commands from the Department of Finance.
Once the commands setting down what funds are available have been issued, McCreevy and his officials will hear the begging bowl pleas of the spending Departments.
All of which was foreseeable - and foreseen.
When the good times rolled McCreevy advised his crowd to party, party, party all the way.
This was the payback crowd - encouraged by a mob of O'Reilly's lads in Middle Abbey Street and their smart-ass friends on Today FM.
Others of a similar bent spice up their cocktails with a really republican fizz - you could look up the recipes in the Sunday Business Post - before getting down to advice on the tax system or corner-cutting at high speed.
The referendum will keep the rest busy with foolish argument which already echoes the discussions of 1983 and 1992.
Only the other night I heard one legal expert explain how the present referendum formula was like cloning - with a bit taken from this and a bit from that, all knit together - a little like Dolly the sheep.
This expert had the good grace to add that,at the time of the cloning, no one was afraid of Dolly - it was what would follow that worried them.
We are, indeed, in a legal laboratory; or, if you choose, a legal or medical playground in which we're invited to admire the experts as they do their stuff.
Cayman Ireland, with the mullahs to distract you.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie