Thankfully US politics has provided some real drama and substance in recent weeks, writes Noel Whelan. There has been very little of either in Irish politics.
Politics and much of the coverage of it in this country is currently stuck in a groove - the controversy about Bertie Ahern's personal finances just keeps going around and around.
Phil Hogan is a shrewd operator and he showed considerable parliamentary and political skill last Wednesday night. His timing was perfect. Earlier that day he got confirmation in a reply to a parliamentary question that, in 1994, Ahern's office had been involved in processing a passport application for Norman Turner, one of the businessmen behind the proposal at the time to build a casino near the Phoenix Park.
Instead of letting Enda Kenny use this new information in leaders' questions that afternoon, Hogan decided to keep it so it could be deployed to greater effect during the Dáil debate on the Mahon tribunal. In doing so he was forgoing coverage in the early evening news bulletins, but as a result guaranteed a greater impact in later broadcasts and in the following morning's newspapers. However, not even Hogan could have hoped for the whirlwind that his story generated.
Hogan claimed that Ahern's involvement in facilitating Turner's passport application showed that he had a closer association with the casino developer than he had previously suggested. On foot of Hogan's claim the main RTÉ evening news bulletin led with the headline that the Taoiseach had new questions to answer. This was followed by live reporting from the front of Government Buildings which revisited the controversy about the Phoenix Park casino, repeated how Turner had given a donation to Fianna Fáil, reminded viewers of the suggestion of lodgements of foreign currencies into the Taoiseach's accounts in the 1990s, and then reported on Hogan's new information, which it was claimed was serious and significant.
There followed an extended clip featuring soundbites from Hogan, who repeated all these surrounding details and implied that coincidences in timing suggested nefarious things had gone on. Then it was back live to Government Buildings for even more reporting and a promise that this story would run and run. A denial from the Taoiseach's spokesperson that there was anything improper about the passport application was reported at the top of the story but was quickly lost in the overall suggestion that this was a significant twist to the Ahern finances controversy.
The passport story was followed in the news bulletin by another report about the rest of the Dáil debate on the Mahon tribunal, which ran right up to the commercial break. The people of Arklow have some entitlement to feel aggrieved that, as a result of the extended coverage of this passport story, the loss of 360 jobs in their town was relegated to the second half of the bulletin.
I credit myself with a fairly forensic mind but I have to admit that it was six or seven minutes into RTÉ's news bulletin on Wednesday night before I realised that there was nothing to this passport story. The remarks from Hogan, the tenor and tone of the reporting and the prominence and extent to which it was covered by RTÉ all suggested that there was substance to the suggestion that something untoward had been done in order to enable Turner to obtain this passport. It echoed the "passports for sale" controversies which broke in the 1990s and the earlier stories of Charles Haughey instructing officials to give passports to sheiks.
It wasn't clear until near the end of the section of the news bulletin given over to the story that the only involvement of Ahern's office was to send Turner's application to the Passport Office and then to get it back to Turner. In doing so they were using a designated procedure which TDs and Senators often use to deliver and collect passport applications more speedily.
The next day's newspapers ran thunderclap headlines suggesting this passport "bombshell" was a seismic development. Bundling it with the (much more significant) story of Ahern having to correct his earlier statements about when the Revenue could rule on his tax compliance, some newspapers presented the Taoiseach as being at the centre of a political crisis the like of which hadn't been seen since the early 1980s.
By lunchtime the passport story had run into the sand. Once the fact that Turner was automatically entitled to a passport because his mother was born in Cork was more widely reported, the "crisis" had passed. Some journalist who had given the story overblown coverage that morning now turned on Fine Gael, accusing them of being inept in hopping this ball without adequate follow-through.
The Taoiseach must carry the primary responsibility for the fact that he is currently haunted by controversy about his personal finances. It was he who accepted moneys in inappropriate circumstances in the 1990s. He has compounded the situation by being reluctant and truculent in providing information, not only to the tribunal but also to the media. The assault which Ahern, his surrogates and some of his Ministers directed at the tribunal before Christmas was over the top. There is a sense that all of those in and around the tribunal - those inquiring, those giving evidence and those reporting on it - have lost perspective and are unable to see the issues arising from it in their wider context.
It is also the case, however, that too many in the media are taking short-cuts in their coverage of the controversy. It is true that Ahern has contributed to an environment where his utterances lack credibility, but too often charges and allegations levelled at him by his political or media opponents are being taken at face value and repeated without first being subjected to critical analysis.
For several hours Wednesday night into Thursday morning that's what happened to this passport story.