"Will the Taoiseach make Government time available to allow the House express support for the efforts of Minister Joe Jacob to shut down Sellafield?", Emmet Stagg wanted to know. The House broke into a large grin, not because the subject is even slightly risible but because the image of Joe Jacob closing Sellafield is. In fairness to Joe, his more vaunted predecessors didn't have much success either.
Joe is one of a dwindling band of old style Fianna Failers. Not for him the thrusting assertiveness of Mary Hanafin or the laidback urbanity of Eoin Ryan. Joe "aspires" to Sellafield being closed in his political lifetime. In that earnest, plodding rhetoric of his, Joe had the wit in his hour of need to wrap the Attorney General around him. In the light of recent developments, Joe intoned, he would be asking the Attorney General to review the earlier advice. Well that's putting it up to Michael McDowell. If McDowell differs from his predecessors, Joe is on a winner. If he doesn't, it's McDowell's fault.
It was the busiest week of the Dail term so far. One would never know that from media reportage.
More and more colleagues are coming to Drapier bemoaning the old days when the Dail could command generous coverage. Drapier thinks the time has come for colleagues to confront the reality of the diminishing role of the national Parliament. Unfortunately, we ourselves are exaggerating the decline by holding on to archaic procedures and conventions. In addition, some of the changes introduced have not worked. That is not to justify the increasingly negligible coverage of Oireachtas proceedings in the print media. But the malaise will not be halted by railing against perceived failings of the press. The Dail will have to put its own House in order, so to speak.
That having been said, it must be something of a record that, in a week in which both the Finance Bill and the Social Welfare Bill are before the House, both go unreported. Drapier remembers when the Committee Stage of the Finance Bill was one of the major set pieces of the Dail calendar. Strictly, of course the Finance Bill is no longer in the Dail Chamber but in Select Committee.
There, Charlie McCreevy did battle for three days with Michael Noonan and Derek McDowell. A small number of backbenchers such as Jimmy Deenihan and Sean Fleming played their parts. Not a single reporter attended.
The Social Welfare Bill fared no better in the Dail Chamber. It attracted the usual high number of contributors. It seems not unreasonable to expect some scrutiny of a measure that allows a £4 basic increase in the main allowances and which, even before it is implemented, is under threat of erosion from inflation.
Also largely ignored was Mary Harney's introduction of her much promised National Minimum Wage Bill. By the time Pat Rabbitte, Nora Owen and Joe Higgins were finished, it had more holes than Swiss cheese.
Before the debate Drapier had thought the issue was whether the hourly rate should be a fiver rather than Harney's £4.40. It is now clear that this difference is the least significant part of the argument. Employers may throw in the kitchen sink when calculating the hourly rate - all kinds of premium payments including shift premiums, commissions, productivity, bonus payments, weekend payments and even tips in certain circumstances.
Worse still, in calculating the hourly rate they may exclude annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. The pay of no other category of worker is calculated on such a basis. It speaks volumes about the focus of today's trade unions that having failed to budge Harney on the £4.40 rate, they were prepared to overlook such glaring loopholes.
Simultaneously with all this activity, more committees than Drapier can count were also in session. That's part of the problem, of course, no one else can count them either. Which all goes to show that breaking the House up into committees does not of itself constitute Dail reform. Dail Eireann now has a committee infrastructure that could be serviced only by a House equivalent in size to the big four in Europe.
The suspicion that we have 21 committees because of the necessity to award chairpersons' stipends to disappointed aspiring office-holders does not help with the media who, rather than endure the tedium of committee meetings, find it more congenial to use the Freedom of Information Act to write in a blanket fashion about colleagues' expenses.
Drapier looked in on the silky presentation by Peter Bacon, who seems well pleased with himself that he has arrested "the rate of accelerating increase" in house prices. What is it about even sensible economists such as Dan McLaughlin that they lose contact with the society in which they live? Drapier ended up almost feeling sorry for McLoughlin in his clash with Eamon Gilmore and John FitzGerald on Prime Time. McLaughlin, of course, was talking about a market and how it might hold up for wealthy banking clients, whereas Gilmore was talking about how first-time buyers might put a roof over their heads.
No amount of self-contented purring by Bacon or market-related theorising by McLaughlin can change the fact that houses are, for most people, homes and they are now out of reach of many young people.
Finally, this week many colleagues are mulling over Bertie's "unguarded remark" deploring the Spencer Dock Development Plans. The remark came in a breathlessly soft-focus piece on RTE and, as was remarked in the House, hot on the heels of Dermot Desmond donning the mantle of environmentalist. Drapier thinks the remark was about as unguarded as the VIP invitation to Kinsealy for this weekend's jamboree.