Government representatives have been rather insensitive in their recent description of the Oireachtas Report time-slot on Network Two as being appropriate "only for drunks and insomniacs".

The Irish community of drunks and insomniacs has at last begun to make its objections known.

It has been a slow process, of course, because when the insomniacs are, as usual, trying to get to sleep, the drunks are, as usual, trying to wake up. Organising a common debate has therefore proved difficult. In fact, getting a word out of any of them is next to impossible.

However, a spokesman has at length pointed out that Oireachtas Report, or OR as the show is known to aficionados, is extremely popular among this particular community. The insomniacs find it an instant temporary cure for their particular affliction, while the drunks approve of the filming restriction which disallows sudden camera movement, often a factor in the spilling of drink.

All in all, these people find OR a welcome diversion, and remain highly protective of its late-night time slot. They point out that were it to change or disappear, they would be left at the mercy of the BBC Learning Zone, unnecessarily violent late-night movies, horrifying Tales from the Crypt and endless repeats of RTE's tormented philosophical discussion show, The Blackbird and the Bell.

Right. Now to more exalted matters. In this newspaper the other day it was reported that the Department of Education is being accused by teachers of abdicating its legal responsibilities when problems arise in schools. We were told that the Department "washes its hands like Pontius Pilot".

First reference to ice-cream in the Bible? Walls of Jericho. First mention of tennis? When Joseph served in Pharaoh's court. First reference to aviation? Pontius Pilot.

Meanwhile I saw my old friend Father David O'Hanlon CC making a welcome return to the letters pages last Friday.

It was David, readers will recall, who, just over a year ago, took objection to our then President Robinson's supposedly unseemly garb and manner when visiting the Pope at the Vatican.

David, then 28, was based at the Irish College in Rome at the time and was thus presumably well placed to observe what he called President Robinson's "swaggering disrespect, forced mockery and an almost adolescent sneer". However, there were those who disagreed strongly with his assessment.

I confessed at the time that I was David's literary adviser, and that it was I who urged him to litter his prose with archaic references, accumulated baroque detail, big words and obscure Latin phrases, all with the intention of putting the ordinary reader in his ignorant place. I also showed him how useful it can be to drag into an argument controversial matters like contraception and abortion even when they have no bearing whatsoever on the subject.

David is now a curate in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, and on Friday he explained in these pages, for once and for all, one hopes, why women can never be ordained as Catholic priests.

I was delighted to see that David has not only retained the elements of literary style which I was happy to impart to him, but embellished them considerably.

David's literary bearing, as revealed in Friday's letter on the ordination of women, is now so magisterial, so vastly superior, so dismissive of ordinary intellects, so supremely confident, so indisputably knowledgeable, so unutterably wise, so unapologetically proud, so infinitely insightful, so inexorably logical and so gloriously impenetrable that it must rank as one of the most remarkable pieces of epistolary literature of all time.

Look: I know you all read it just three days ago, but I must quote something to demonstrate the plane on which David's mind works. He first points out that the sexes, though equal, are distinct. This takes him only about 100 words.

Then he says: "It is for this reason that it cannot be immaterial, for example, whether a man has sex with another man instead of with a woman or vice versa. It is for this reason that a man who carries a foetus in his abdominal cavity or a man who is hormonally induced to lactate cannot ever be in any true sense a mother. It is for this reason that a woman can never validly be ordained to the priesthood."

If I could be hormonally induced to write prose like that, following logic like that, I would never look back.