THERE WAS a huge crowd in Leinster House on Wednesday night for the launch of the Nealon’s Guide to the 31st Dáil and 24th Seanad.

Enda was in flying form, gambolling down memory lane. Because he can. The younger Deputies and Senators were enthralled.

He told of Ted Nealon – who begat the venerable guide – coming to visit Mayo in 1983, when he was Minister for State for Arts and Culture. Ted delivered “an outstanding contribution about the arts, about the treasures of antiquity, about the wonders of our culture and what he was going to do about all these things.”

Then he invited questions.

“Minister Nealon. I come from Ballyglass. The land is being eaten alive by the rabbits. What are you going to do about the myxomatosis?”

Enda recalled the time former Labour TD Brendan Halligan, then the chairman of Sustainable Energy Ireland, “arrived down to the far-flung constituency of Mayo West on a really sharp crisp morning to look at the wave energy systems out off at Annagh head at Belmullet.

“To get out there you have to drive through the sand dunes and you go round and up and down and you lose sight of everything because it’s like the Gobi desert. We suddenly came over a rise and there, shining and shimmering in the sun, was the Atlantic Ocean.

“ ‘God’, says he, ‘what’s the name of that lake?’ I said: ‘It’s Lacus Atlanticus.’ ‘Never heard of the place,’ said Brendan.”

The Taoiseach took slight issue with the title of the guide, which is edited by our own Stephen Collins. “It should be called, in brackets, ‘the Right Result’.”

Ceann Comhairle Seán Barrett and his Seanad counterpart, Paddy Burke, performed the official launch.

Afterwards, Seán and Paddy repaired to the visitor’s bar with a cross-party assortment of politicians, where they swapped yarns of comrades past who graced the pages of Nealon’s Guide.

It is published by Gill and MacMillan and would make a perfect stocking filler for your favourite political anorak.