DAIL deputies returning for Thursday's special session on crime, and indeed those who trickle in and out daily for the committees, will miss one essential element in Leinster House - the bar. Both the Visitors' Bar and the Members' Bar, which is very strictly off limits to everyone in the house except past and present Oireachtas members and MEPs, are being totally refurbished over the summer.
The job is part of a general redecoration of many of the facilities. The restaurant has already been done up and plans are well afoot to move members' offices from Kildare House into Agriculture House, from where many civil servants are being moved to Wexford.
The bars, Quidnunc is informed, are practically identical except for the alcove in the Members known as Conspirators' Corner. They have not been done up for 20 years and lack natural light apart from the occasional glimmer through a few skylights. Commenting on the facelift, one member spoke of how on FF's entry in 1927 de Valera ordained that none of his people was to frequent the bar. It appears he may not have been obeyed. Historians say that some of the behaviour in the chamber during that period would indicate strongly that members had drink taken.
Later in the 1940s, the committee on procedure and privilege ruled that women should be barred from the bar. Since the few women members who existed were almost exclusively widows it was a very strict edict indeed as in those days no woman of respectability would go into a bar anyway. You should see it today.