McDowell and Adams agonistes

Max McGuinness on the great/somewhat tedious debates

The debates this week were largely tedious – predictably so, given our deliberately untheatrical parliamentary culture. The rules of the Dáil are rigged to prevent the kind of anarchic cut and thrust which makes Prime Minister's Questions at Westminster an ever entertaining spectacle.

The tone was set by Pat Rabbitte (allegedly something of a rhetorician himself) when he swatted away Michael McDowell's schoolboy debater routine: "What people want to hear is not old fellas like us debating as if they were in the L and H."

Alas, I fear he might be right. The Irish are supposed to be the greatest talkers in the world but when it comes to out politicians, irreverence is out lest we forget for a moment how desperately concerned they all are about the "issues."

The exception to this, it has to be said, is McDowell, who was not short of bon mots on Wednesday night when faced with Gerry Adams's sanctimonious declaration that he lives on the average industrial wage. You own two houses! said McDowell indignantly. One of those is owned by the bank, chuckled Gerry. You mean the Northern Bank, retorted McDowell before helpfully reminding the viewers that his poor mouth-playing interlocutor sits on the IRA Army Council.

The fact that Rabbitte and Sargent happily let Gerry's pose as the €30,000 man go unchallenged is a poor reflection on the Irish Left. As George Orwell once wrote: "Some things are true, even if the Daily Telegraph says they are true."

Incidentally, the one Irish politician who does live on the average industrial wage is Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins, whose own digs, as described last week by Róisín Ingle in the Irish Times, clearly won't be featuring alongside Gerry's in the pages of VIP anytime soon.

Higgins also shares McDowell's gift for repartee, memorably comparing  "the Taoiseach’s embrace of socialism on the banks of the Tolka" to Saul's conversion on the Road to Damascus.

And so to Thursday's clash between Bertie and Inda, remarkable only for the latter's benign waffle about "priorities", "integrity", "responsibility" and the rest, and the former's continued bumbling over the Paddy the Plasterer Affair. During the debate Bertie reiterated that he had done nothing wrong in trousering all that cash while simultaneously emphasising that thanks to ethics legislation introduced by his government, he wouldn't be able to get away with that kind of thing anymore. Goodbye, I must be staying.

Most commentators seem to think Bertie tore strips out of Inda's plan to implement free GP care for the under-fives. But the real question was never asked. Why after nearly two decades of boom, should anyone have to pay to see a doctor? In the U.K, now theoretically less prosperous than ourselves, GP care is entirely free.  At the last election Fine Gael were promising free GP care for the everyone under 18. What happened in between? After five further years of the highest economic growth in the Developed World, Fine Gael's number crunchers have decided that, in fact, six year olds should be prepared to cough up next time they have a cough. No wonder Inda promises not to stand for re-election if he breaks his promises – he has hardly made any!