A celebrated story about Mr Michael Noonan's teaching days tells how he escaped out the window when some boisterous students were chasing him in an end-of-term ritual.
But there was no sign of him attempting to escape through the windows of the National Concert Hall yesterday when boisterous reporters grilled him at an equally gruesome ritual known as a press conference.
Fine Gael's new chief whip, Mr Paul Bradford, may have felt like taking the window exit when he got temporarily nostalgic and heard himself introducing "our party leader, John Bruton."
The new front bench first nervously giggled and then collectively guffawed, neatly displaying Fine Gael's new togetherness and unity of purpose.
Mr Noonan must have been completely exhausted after his press conference, having put himself through an excruciating set of sporting metaphors. At one stage he was in the middle of a rugby match between Shannon and Garryowen.
The next minute he was in a hurling team, marking Bertie as he played hardball.
Then he was hitting the ground running and saying that he was "going to continue running as fast as I can". And he even found energy to threaten "an early joust" with Bertie.
Really getting into his sporting stride, Mr Noonan said the Government was "a lot like an unfit team that had been winning for a long time.
"They think all they have to do is trot out on the pitch and they'll win again. I think when we start running them around - as we have begun to do now in the order of business in the last few days - and when we get the cabinets in place and the cabinets focused on the ministers, I think the general lack of fitness in this particular team will become apparent and we will wonder have they got a full match in them," he said.
And, sporting metaphors exhausted, he went into a huddle with his team as reporters made their excuses and sprinted off.
