'Nuala has astonishing powers," said the Minister for Justice, voice full of disapproval as he listed them, "to arrest, to seize evidence, to require the production of things." Lawyerly rhetoric flowed irresistibly, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
"Quis custodiet custodies?" Michael McDowell wondered. "Who guards the guardians?"
The tag seemed mistaken, given that the theme was how to investigate the Garda. But the Minister's distaste for Nuala's role was unmistakable. The Republic's future guard-guardian would be a trinity, he promised, so as to be "always inherently self-regulating".
The Minister's "Nuala" is the North's Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan. They ran into each other at the MacGill Summer School and shared a question-and-answer session that RTÉ's This Week rightly considered still relevant enough to reprise last Sunday.
Even listening to her months later, after several reports of the clash, it was clear that Nuala O'Loan had not enjoyed the Minister's portrait of an over-mighty functionary. It was important nobody went away with the idea that "this Ombudsman has powers beyond the law. She doesn't. My personal opinions don't matter tuppence. What matters is what lies in front of me, the evidence."
It goes without saying now that every Dublin government will have views on the conduct and course of Northern politics. British ministers don't like this much, some home-grown Northern officials still bristle at the very idea, sometimes unconsciously. Unionist politicians of all hues when stuck for a tough-sounding anti-nationalist line still deplore the "meddling of a foreign state".
But it's a fact of life: anti-agreement unionists may have fallen back into routine rants at "Irish interference", but there was the DUP as brand-new No 1 party, in Downing Street with Tony and Bertie. Bertie and Tony are famously matey. Ministers with varying degrees of interest and expertise liaise with the Northern Ireland Office. Department of Foreign Affairs specialists mark Northern insititutions, training the young diplomats of the future by setting them to study the workings of exotic beasts like the Human Rights Commission, its Dublin counterpart still a fledgling.
How much Dublin input influences British stewardship is a subject rarely reflected upon and not much examined. How Northern nationalists rate Dublin's performance is another unexplored topic.
When unionists struggled angrily against the institutionalising of the Republic's role, nationalists loaded it with significance. Keeping Dublin engaged was vital to establishing the peace process, but at that stage Dublin's interest was equally strong.
Weighing the day-to-day impact 10 years on is an exercise few would welcome: others would use it to vindicate their original objections. Bertie pushed for an election, British sources complain, like the Americans, and the outcome has been just as Tony feared.
The complaint is partly bogus, since even the most loyal apparatchiks concede that postponing the election improved nothing and are agreed it could not be postponed for ever.
There are so many points where Bertie has not pushed hard, as on the postponed publication of Judge Cory's report. The two prime ministers agreed the contentious cases the retired Canadian would examine, and Tony Blair promised to publish the results and set up inquiries if recommended. Now Cory's reports are being combed as though for arguments against publication, the sceptical believe.
Bertie's idea of pressure has been to announce that Dublin will set up the inquiries Cory called for in the Republic: there are no signs that London feels compelled to follow suit, nor that Dublin is nagging.
When the peace process morning was glad and confident, it was Dublin officials who wrote up much of the Belfast Agreement's prescription for a level playing-field. Who now recalls that early in the process there was an apparently open-hearted undertaking to overhaul the Republic as well, to strengthen human rights, guard the guardians of the state?
Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan's "astonishing powers" vis-à-vis Northern policing grew out of that vision, while in Dublin the steam went out of doing anything much on the home front for as long as possible.
Northerners listen with amusement to the delayed debate on garda accountability. Many are not unionist. One professional observer has also watched the O'Loan operation weather RUC hostility, notably Sir Ronnie Flanagan's "I'd commit suicide in public" outburst when her investigators - tough London cops - found the Omagh investigation badly flawed.
"We saw an establishment unable to cope with someone they thought as conservative as themselves but who took seriously the independence written into her job," the observer said.
There is a widely shared Northern verdict on the South's readiness to put its own house in order. "Dublin was all for an Ombudsman, until they realised what it meant."