Dáil Sketch Frank McNally IN advance of the Dáil's resumption, the Greens had attacked the overuse of scripts in parliamentary debates. But in a dramatic U-turn, the party's TDs turned up for the opening session with some of the largest pieces of script the Oireachtas has ever seen.
As the Taoiseach rose to answer his first question about the Iraq crisis, the Greens unfolded the message "NO TO WAR" in nearly two-foot-high letters: one letter per TD, except for Ciarán Cuffe, who had to hold two, because the party is a seat short of a full slogan.
The protest attracted scorn from both the Government benches ("Hold them up higher and cover your faces," suggested Fianna Fail's Jim Glennon) and those of Fine Gael, where there were sneers about cheap stunts and posturing.
But in fairness to the Green's men of letters, the protest took a bit of organising, and was not without risk. Had they sat down in slightly the wrong order, their message could have supported President Bush's State of the Union address by urging: "ON TO WAR". And besides, when Trevor Sargent explained the visual display in terms of the Taoiseach's "deafness" to criticism of Government policy, he might have given Mr Ahern an idea.
If the Taoiseach spelled out his replies to Dáil questions in the same way, maybe the Opposition would stop being sarcastic about his alleged inability to ever give a simple answer.
To hear Pat Rabbitte or Joe Higgins tell it, not even Hans Blix and his team could find anything meaningful in a Bertie Ahern sentence, despite what they see as the Taoiseach's constant pretence of co-operation with the inspectors.
After one such reply to a query about the use of Shannon by US planes, an exasperated Mr Higgins paraphrased a quote from the recent farmer's protest: "Asking the Taoiseach a question is like trying to play handball against a haystack. There's a dull thud and the ball never comes back. It goes all over the world, but it certainly doesn't come back to the person asking the question."
Mr Ahern's defence of Government policy did indeed cover a lot of the globe, from New York ("our position is one of total support for Kofi Annan and the UN") to Baghdad ("there's one man calling the shots"), via a scenic stop-over in Shannon ("one of the great locations for planes landing").
But the Opposition could see no integrity in the Government's position on Iraq.
The impasse was summed up during an interlude in the war talk, when the Taoiseach mentioned plans to visit Russia in May."That oul' jet will never get you there," quipped Fine Gael's Gay Mitchell, to which Mr Ahern quipped back: "I'll say nothing!"
As far as the Opposition are concerned, he could hold that message up in two-foot-high letters.