DÁIL SKETCH:THE MEN in white coats arrived in a big van yesterday morning and parked outside the gates of Leinster House. They opened the back door of their capacious vehicle, stood by it and waited, writes MIRIAM LORD

This was rather a disappointment, as a small crowd of one journalist and a man on a bike had gathered in the hope they might storm the building with butterfly nets and capture some of its more daft inhabitants.

At the same time, a few yards up the way in the Department of Finance, Opposition spokespeople were having a serious meeting with department officials. They had been summoned to hear the gory details of the State’s rapidly deteriorating finances.

At 10.20, the ashen-faced finance frontbenchers stumbled out and reeled down Merrion Street. As they neared the gates of Leinster House, two men in white coats bustled on to the pavement, wheeling what looked like a hospital trolley. There was a very large and very dead tiger lying on it. This was just too much.

The glassy-eyed spokespeople gasped. The glassy-eyed tiger didn’t, for it had gasped its last back in 1913 near Kathmandu. But the spokespeople weren’t to know that. After what they had just been through, this was like a message from Beyond.

Had Joan Burton been wearing pearls, her trembling fingers would have flown instantly to her throat. Labour’s tireless finance spokeswoman, who hasn’t stopped to draw breath since the October budget, was rendered speechless.

Sinn Féin’s Arthur Morgan stopped in his tracks before the recumbent tiger, which once burned bright in the forest of the Natural History Museum – before the staircase collapsed.

“Would you believe it? There it is, laid out in front us. The body of the Celtic Tiger,” he observed, with a grim smile. Arthur paused a moment. “Shot by the British.” And he was right. It was bagged in Nepal and presented by King George V to his loyal subjects in Dublin.

So, strictly according to provenance, this once vibrant but now dead animal was not a Celtic tiger. But there was no point in upsetting Deputy Morgan any further, who, like his Opposition colleagues, was still trying to come to terms with what he had just been told by the mandarins in Finance.

The minds of the shocked spokespeople were so addled by talk of black holes and missing billions, unemployment figures, expenditure cuts and income levies, that they didn’t care about the tiger’s origins. All they could see was a metaphor, and a sorry one at that.

Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton and Kieran O’Donnell did a double take, swivelling their heads for a longer look as they walked past. As a result, they didn’t see the other trolleys.

(The footpath outside Leinster House yesterday morning, which is right next door to the Natural History Museum, resembled the emergency department of the Mater hospital on a Saturday night.) There were trolleys all over the place, lots of white coats, policemen, pickled bodies and dazed outpatients – Joan and company – walking around giving out about the Government.

Richard and Kieran nearly tripped over a cheetah. Fangs bared. “A cheetah?” Kieran snorted. “Well, that’s no surprise. We found plenty of cheetahs in the banking establishment over the last few months – they’re one of the reasons we’re in so much trouble now.”

Meanwhile Deputy Burton found another creature blocking her way, a mangy-looking cur, snarling aggressively on its little plinth. But Joan had regained her composure, and her voice. “I lived in Africa for many years. That’s a hyena,” she declared. “Hyenas are scavengers. They come along after the predators have killed and they crunch up the bones until there is nothing left. Only dust.”

She shook her head sadly. “What an interesting postscript to the Celtic Tiger. Only dust. Have you heard the figures for the fiscal shortfall? Terrible.” The men in the white coats stood well back.

One of them was Nigel Monaghan from the Natural History Museum. The hyena, he told us, came from South Africa in 1891. “They used to live in Ireland during the Ice Age, you know. Contemporaneous with the woolly mammoth.”

Nigel should have gone on into Leinster House. He would have discovered a thriving colony of hyenas on the Fine Gael benches. Their cackles during Leaders’ Questions were ear-splitting. Truly, it was a source of great sadness to people all around the country when the Natural History Museum had to close for safety reasons.

Yesterday, the tiger, cheetah and hyena were being shipped off to a taxidermy firm in the Netherlands for a wash and stuff-up. “We don’t have an in-house taxidermist in Dublin,” said Mr Monaghan.

He could have tried next door in the Dáil, but on second thoughts, they prefer to skin their specimens alive in there.

As for the men in white coats, they drove off with just the dead animals in their van, and the denizens of Leinster House breathed a sigh of relief.