America - Conor O'Clery: The four-day event at Ashford Castle, Co Mayo, in the summer of 2003 was called a "Client and Congressional Seminar & Retreat". Five Republicans from the US Congress attended, some with their wives.
All the expenses, amounting to $25,000, were paid by a lobbyist. That's against ethics rules and the five; Senators Gordon Smith and Don Nickles and Congressmen Howard Coble, Harold Rogers and Clay Shaw, have had some explaining to do since the trip was reported this week by The Hill, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is already under investigation for three trips, including one to London and St Andrews, which were put on lobbyist Jack Abramoff's American Express credit card.
Abramoff, who is under criminal investigation for other dealings, went on the trip himself as a friend who, as he told Time on Monday, "was drawn to Tom because of our shared interest in the Bible and like political philosophies".
He sort of got round the ethics rules by having a non-profit group pay for DeLay and his party that was reimbursed by gambling interests. It's not a breach of ethics rules if a junket is sponsored by a non-profit, a company or a trade group.
It is, however, against the rules for the lobbyist to pay and then get reimbursed later.
That's what is happening in the case of the 'Ashford Castle Five'. Their trip was paid for by Kessler & Associates, a top Washington lobby firm that represents big drug companies, many with business interests in Ireland, like Pfizer, Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories.
Kessler has explained that the firm's parent company, Century Business Services, a Cleveland-based accounting firm, had actually sponsored the trip. The politicians, who debated such things as international accounting practices at Ashford Castle, are pleading ignorance.
A Republican aide told The Hill's Josephine Hearn that one section of the trip was actually devoted to the Irish peace process. So that's all right then.
It's not just Republicans who are getting caught up in 'junketgate'.
It was reported this week that two Democratic members of Congress were also funded by Abramoff for an outing, this one to the Northern Mariana Islands. The lobbyist was reimbursed by his law firm, Preston Gates Ellis, which was reportedly paid later by the islands' government.
At the time of the trip, in the mid-1990s, Abramoff was the Washington lobbyist for the Northern Marianas, a US protectorate in the Pacific where business interests were keen to prevent Congress from imposing a minimum wage for garment workers.
The two Congressmen were ostensibly invited to the islands by a not-for-profit group and say they did not know it was Abramoff who actually picked up the $16,000 bill.
The travel affair is beginning to look like the 1991 House banking scandal that cost many legislators their careers. The now defunct House Bank allowed 300 members to get away with writing bad cheques.
Even if the House Ethics committee - back in business after dumping new rules that protected DeLay - clears all the junketeers, voters may extract a price in the 2006 elections.
Mud sticks, and Republicans are likely to suffer most as the party that won power in the mid-1990s by claiming a higher ethical standard. Precisely because they are the party in power they have been wooed more by the lobbyists. And not just with fancy hotels and golf.
Mr Abramoff owned a Washington restaurant which he operated like the House Bank. Many Republican events were held there and the patron-lobbyist sometimes didn't insist on payment.
Republicans who enjoyed his largesse are rushing to settle up their accounts. Among them was House Speaker Dennis Hastert, whose campaign held a big 2003 fundraiser at Abramoff's place, Signatures.
His people did not pay the bill until long afterwards, and then only after Business Week asked Hastert's office about it.
Democrats will attempt to use the travel and free lunch scandals next year the way the Republicans used the bank scandal to turf their opponents out in the early 1990s.
The name of Abramoff's restaurant was appropriate, said Democrat Rahm Emanuel. "All that Republicans needed was their signature on the bill; neither cash nor credit was necessary." There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
First Lady Laura Bush brought the house down at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington on Saturday, comparing herself to a "desperate housewife" watching ABC's Desperate Housewives while "Mr Excitement", the president, went to bed early. It wasn't so much her emergence as a talented stand-up comic that made a stir, as the barbed nature of some of the comments that came from the lips of the ultra-polite former librarian.
"George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain-saw," she said. "Which is why I think he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well." She took aim at her mother-in-law Barbara Bush, whom she compared to Don Corleone, and joked about going to a male strip show with Condoleezza Rice.
If the White House had a strategy in putting up the First Lady on a par with Jay Leno , it was to make the Bush family funny at a time when the president's ratings are sinking.
It worked for the Reagans in 1982 when Nancy Reagan sang "Second Hand Clothes" to the tune of Secondhand Rose, to soften her much-criticised reputation for demanding used model outfits from fashion designers.
The same comic writer, Landon Parvin, who worked for the Reagans, was brought in to pen the script for Laura Bush. Eyebrows were raised with the excruciating horse joke she delivered. George Bush was a greenhorn when he first bought the ranch, but he had "learned a lot about ranching since he tried to milk a horse," she said. "What's worse, it wasa male horse."