Michael McDowell chewed gum furiously, as Noel Dempsey took the Dáil's Order of Business.
Where was Mary Harney, the usual replacement for Bertie Ahern on Thursdays?
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte had had a sighting of the Tánaiste. "I mean no disrespect to the Minister for Communications, but the Tánaiste is in the car-park talking on her mobile-phone. The Taoiseach will not come to the House, and it now appears the Tánaiste will not do so."
It was a busy day for Minister for Justice Michael McDowell as he piloted the Garda Síochána Bill through the House until its 8pm guillotine, and he also took routine departmental questions. Little wonder, perhaps, he was chewing gum with a particular intensity when deputies gathered in the morning.
On Wednesday he had taken time off from the Chamber to announce a childcare package. Mr Rabbitte wondered yesterday if the Minister would be leaving later to attend "another photo-shoot". He saidthat on any day in which Mr McDowell did not speak before a large number of cameras and microphones he went into withdrawal.
"Or into a cafe-bar," said Fine Gael's Padraic McCormack.
Although Mr McDowell might have been chewing gum, he refused to eat humble pie in the face of an Opposition onslaught on the guillotining of the Bill.
Mind you, the Government had a certain amount of egg on its face at the end of it all, with backbenchers making themselves scarce and unavailable to heckle the putative rainbow as it hammered its message home.
Indeed, matters were going so well on the Opposition benches that Sinn Féin's Aengus Ó Snodaigh issued a statement welcoming the cross-party support for his proposal that there be a single ombudsman for the Garda similar to the "Six Counties".
Mr McDowell, meanwhile, was still chewing gum when Labour's Eamon Gilmore banged the bench with his fist, claiming that there was a conflict of evidence between the Minister and John O'Donoghue, a former justice minister, about the circumstances relating to an initial Garda investigation into the activities of Donegal gardaí. "Two Ministers have put two contradictory statements on the record. Which record is correct?"
When he remarked that ministers in the past had lied to each other and to the House, Ceann Comhairle Dr Rory O'Hanlon warned he would have to withdraw the claim.
And so it went on. By question time, Mr McDowell had ceased to chew gum.
When the Garda presence at Croke Park was raised, the Minister revealed he does not have U2 tickets. Strange. After all, doesn't Bono sometimes chew gum?