Before his now famous interview on the Marian Finucane radio show, Joe Jacob was not among the country's best-known politicians. A Fianna Fβiler of the old school (the one where Terry Prone didn't teach), his communication skills were honed for the megaphone rather than the radio mike. Outside his Wicklow constituency and the parliamentary party room, he had risen without trace to become junior minister.
A back-bencher under Charles Haughey, whom he enthusiastically supported, he deftly repositioned himself behind Albert Reynolds in time to be rewarded with the party chairmanship in 1992. He became Leas-Cheann Comhairle in 1993, and then held onto the post, despite the initial intentions of the new taoiseach, John Bruton, in 1994.
Jacob's ladder was still in safe working order in 1997 when Bertie Ahern elevated him to minister of state at the Department of Transport, Energy and - in an irony only now apparent - Communications.
He has worked hard at his brief, in particular pursuing the closure of Sellafield with an earnestness which, for all the condescension of the Opposition, has been as effective as previous attempts. But when he volunteered to go on RT╔ last Wednesday morning to calm the nerves of a nation fearful of nuclear attack, he stepped onto a greasy rung.
In trouble from an early stage, he was apparently unable to cope with Marian Finucane's tactic of pretending the disaster had already happened and asking what people should do now. But his apparent lack of any personal emergency plan for dealing with embarrassing situations added to his difficulties. As one Wicklow wag put it, he was "digging so hard, he could have had his own bunker" at the end of the interview.
Those who know him say he would not necessarily share the popular opinion that his performance was a catastrophe, because he would not accord such importance to the media. But his Government colleagues thought differently. Mary O'Rourke and Mary Harney were among a number who rang him afterwards, with advice to put the episode behind him. The best source of comfort was the Minister for Health, however. Mr Martin's own faux pas took the heat off, and by Thursday Mr Jacob was keeping his head down while his senior colleague was the one searching for the iodine tablets.
A Government source expressed puzzlement at Jacob's performance: "He should know the brief off by heart, because he has done the donkey work. And in fact what he said was accurate enough, as far as it went, even though his delivery was crap. He's an old- style politician - I don't think he'd go near Terry Prone. But part of his problem is he had to be careful about what he said, so as not to cause undue alarm. And the other thing is that the message wasn't very sexy, however he said it.
"If Sellafield is hit and the wind is blowing our way, the news will not be great. Ireland's is as good a plan as any in Europe, but there's no vast bunker under the Bog of Allen we can all head for. The slickest communicator wouldn't have had much more to say than Joe did, but he just would have said it better. I think he was also caught on the hop a bit by Marian Finucane. He was probably expecting a more soft-focus approach, but she knows how to ask the questions."
The emergency plan apart, Jacob's own survival skills will stand him well in the wake of the debacle. Although seen in Leinster House as a genial, easy-going figure, he has a tough streak honed in the hostile post-nuclear landscape of Fianna Fβil politics in Wicklow. His days as a Gaelic footballer in the county will have helped too.
"He's tough. He'd know how to lock a referee in the boot - although I don't mean that literally," says the same Government source.
When he ran successfully for the Dβil in 1987, he listed "unemployment and emigration" as his main concerns. He had experience of both, emigrating twice to Britain in the 1950s and 60s, before returning to a career with the NET fertilizer plant in Arklow and developing a pub business, Jacob's Well, in Rathdrum. He married Patti Grant, the daughter of one of Fianna Fβil's founding members in the county, and they reared a family of six children. One of them, Noel, has since taken over the pub.
His career in politics took off in the 1980s, with first a seat on Wicklow County Council (Noel has taken that over too) and his ascension two years later to the Dβil.
His megaphone oratory is recalled by a constituent: "I remember him speaking in Downshire House in Blessington, talking about Charlie Haughey. It was all: 'There's a little man in Dublin that I love, a great little man, a little man who has a big vision for this country.' It was amazing stuff. I think he had tears in his eyes at one stage."
He may have learned something from Mr Haughey about maximising physical presence. Mr Jacob is know for wearing shoes that make him appear taller than he is, and he has not been above adding colour to his hair, either. But when his hero departed the political scene, the Wicklow man was well-placed to profit from the new leadership.
Party chairman and an increasingly confident voice, he warned in 1994 that companies deliberately evading tax should not benefit from the tax amnesty. His "whole being screams " at the idea, he said.
On appointment to the junior ministry he immersed himself in the issue of the Sellafield reprocessing plant, which has dominated his public statements over the past four years. When he told Marian Finucane he had "nuclear on the brain" (after she corrected his inadvertent suggestion that Ireland was a nuclear State, rather than a neutral one), this was probably no exaggeration. But if the basic material was there, his reprocessing facilities appear to have failed him on this occasion.
He will now be anxious to move on from the experience. With a general election in the offing, he can only hope that fall-out from the fiasco will be kept to a minimum, at least in South Wicklow. And that, even on a purely rhetorical level, he is not facing a nuclear winter in the Dβil.