Dáil Sketch/Miriam Lord:This is no laughing matter. The spectre of drugged-up Ministers in shiny suits, strung out on statistics, haunts the corridors of power.
Fine Gael's clean-cut Simon Coveney is most concerned. He's read a book on drug taking among the middle classes, in which a Minister is quoted as saying he takes cocaine on a regular basis. Simon raised the issue in the Dáil, and wanted to know if the Taoiseach shares his concern.
He may as well have been talking to the wall as talking to Bertie.
The Taoiseach was slumped in his seat with a faraway look in his eyes, a little smile on his face. He was feeling no pain, having just taken his weekly fix of statistics in full view of the house.
Things have been very difficult of late for Bertie. For months, he had been saying he wanted to kick the habit. Finally, a rehab place became available at Dublin Castle and he went in for a long stint in the tribunal witness box.
They took his waffle away from him. Banned him from the statistics. A regime of cold turkey and straight answers was forced upon him. He left the castle a chastened man. But he wasn't cured.
At the first opportunity he got, Bertie went right back to his old ways. Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore pleaded with him to give up the statistics and come clean with some proper answers on what his Government is going to do about the growing monster that is the Health Service Executive.
Bertie, faced with the task of tackling the bureaucratic behemoth his Government created, gave in under the strain. Huge waiting lists, recruitment embargos on medical staff, cutbacks and bed closures. What was the Taoiseach going to do about it?
Kenny and Gilmore reminded Bertie that the people did not elect the HSE to power, they elected him. Now, when was he going to stop acting like there is nothing he can do about the situation?
The Opposition leaders were doing Bertie's head in. Before long, he was tripping on statistics. "I can only give you the factual position," he protested, high on percentages and budget outflows.
Unfortunately for the Taoiseach, when he tries these days in the Dáil to take refuge in "the facts", the Opposition bursts out laughing.
Facts were a moveable feast to Bertie when he was in rehab at the Castle. But in an encouraging moment of lucidity on Newstalk's Breakfast Show, Minister Éamon Ó Cuív declared that the HSE is a shambles he finds it impossible to deal with.
In a display of tough love, Enda and Eamon wondered why Bertie couldn't be more like Ó Cuív and ditch the statistics in favour of straight talking.
Ó Cuív was a member of the Cabinet that invented the HSE.
"If he can make neither head nor tail of it, what chance has a patient who is trying to get an operation, a parent who is trying to get an appointment with a speech therapist, or a carer who is trying to get home help?" asked Gilmore.
The Taoiseach, floating in a hazy fug of figures, trilled something about Ó Cuív saying what he said because he was "trying to be helpful" to the HSE.
The Opposition scoffed. "Maybe he could have a whiparound," sneered FG's Paul Connaughton.
Bertie gave him a glazed look and retreated into the statistics again. There is no cutback in resources, the HSE had exceeded its annual budget, he insisted, supplying the relevant figures. He's good at figures, when he puts his mind to them.
Last year, pointed out mellow Bertie, the HSE came in under budget, omitting to mention if his Government's pre-election spending splurge had anything to do with this year's overrun.
Eamon Gilmore was disgusted. "The budget is now more important to you than the patients it serves." But the Taoiseach was in a happy place, oblivious to the human collateral damage brought about by his beloved HSE bean-counters.
By the time Coveney got around to cocaine-snorting Ministers, Bertie just gazed on benignly. The minister quoted in the book apparently says he "isn't the only one around here" who does drugs.
It was left to the Ceann Comhairle to ponder this alarming situation. "That has occurred to me at times, to be honest with you," mused The Bull O'Donoghue, still wondering what substance Bertie was on the day he decided to kill his career.