Over a decade ago, as the last rainbow coalition prepared to take power, the then PD leader Desmond O'Malley gleefully predicted that a certain newly-appointed Labour minister would "go mad in office", writes John Waters.
This failed to happen, or, if it did, was to pass without particular notice. Now, lamentably, it is one of Mr O'Malley's own protégés who seems fair set on such a course. It has already been remarked that his likening of Richard Bruton to Dr Goebbels is but the latest in a series of episodes which give cause for deep alarm as to the emotional stability of the Minister for Justice. So far, nobody has asked why.
The maddening of Michael McDowell is, in one sense, the best show in town: hugely entertaining and wildly unpredictable. But there is a serious side, a human tragedy which we must surely regard with sympathy and compassion. It's all great fun until someone loses an eye.
Mr McDowell was responding to a Fine Gael press release about the number of gardaí on the streets of Dublin, which, because it was a slow news day, ended up as the lead story on the Irish Independent. His description of Mr Bruton as "the Dr Goebbels of propaganda" was possibly more worrying for its tautological construction than its offensiveness, suggesting that the normally elegantly-phrased Minister was, at that moment, radically unhinged. Twice in a five-minute interview the Minister said he was "angry" with Richard Bruton. Why? Because Mr Bruton has distorted figures supplied to him by Mr McDowell in a parliamentary question. This made the Minister "very angry" and "really angry".
It seems obvious from his general behaviour and increasingly frequent outbursts that Mr McDowell is afflicted by some kind of progressive emotional malaise, at the back of which may lie a deep sense of disappointment, even despair. Several clues to the source of this condition were to be observed in his recent speech to a PD event in Waterford, in which he likened the present coalition administration to a sandwich. "It's not the more bulky bread which gives a sandwich its taste," he declared. "Rather, it's the meat which gives a sandwich its flavour. . . I have to say that I find the focus on who will be the next taoiseach to be significantly overblown. If the history of the last 35 years has taught us anything, it is that the most important party in a government is not the senior party but the junior party. The larger party may provide the taoiseach, but the junior party provides the essential direction of the government."
This provoked much commentary focusing on the political implications, but none on what it told us about the emotional state of the Minister. One requires no more than a casual knowledge of Freud to comprehend it as a cry for help, a vainglorious protestation that says more in its subtext than its superficialities. His choice of metaphor suggests that Mr McDowell feels not merely trapped but trapped by lesser entities. With his high-protein PD colleagues, he feels squeezed by thick wedges of simple carbohydrates. But even more interesting is that he referred to a meat sandwich rather than some of the more exotic sorts of fillings - lentils and brandy butter, avocado and tulip - one would expect to be consumed in his own constituency. Here we find a hint as to the Minister's disaffection: despite his trumpeting of the self-importance of the PDs, he feels himself party to a hang sangwich.
We should remember that Mr McDowell was once not merely a member, but an especially blessed member, of Richard Bruton's Fine Gael. Seated on the right-hand side of Garret FitzGerald, he was poised, we now comprehend, to inherit the kingdom of what passed for Irish liberalism.
Instead, in a fit of petulance and impatience, he defected to the PDs, perhaps imagining this to offer a more assured route to greatness. The outcome of that impetuousness must be especially galling for him now, since in recent times he has gained a genuinely elevated place in the affections of the Irish people. For many years, history lay like a shadow between him and the popular imagination, but following the success of the revisionist project, he is now in a position to inherit an increasing legacy of delayed respect for his grandfather, Eoin MacNeill.
A lot of people can't stand him, but many others regard him with immense affection, largely on account of his stances against sundry unmentionables, but by no means least for the entertainment value of his tantrums. Had he stayed in Fine Gael, Mr McDowell might now be the taoiseach-in-waiting. Instead, trapped in a buttery embrace with Fianna Fáil, he contemplates facing the end of his career without having attained the heights to which he feels entitled.
Sadly, due to the PDs obsession with tokenism and political correctness, he has not even attained the highest office within his own party, bringing to mind John Lennon's merciless response when asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world: "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles."