IT was a bad-tempered day in the Dail and nobody was more angry than the Taoiseach.
Twelve angry men couldn't have been as angry as Mr Ahern when he took the morning's order of business. A hurried trip to the sunny south-east hadn't cooled him any by the time he returned for the afternoon debate.
His morning outburst had made a deep impression on the Opposition.
Ruairi Quinn spoke of the "tetchy and petulant manner" of the "normally unflappable" Taoiseach, while John Bruton advised him to vent his "self-ignited anger" somewhere else.
But tetchiness and petulance was fairly general yesterday, and by the end of the debate even the most unflappable of backbenchers were flapping at each other like turkeycocks.
Significantly, little of the anger was directed at the now-abandoned passports-for-sale scheme itself. Fine Gael's Jim O'Keeffe drew jeers from the Fianna Fail benches when he said his party was not critical of it "per se", and Ruairi Quinn had to make a pre-emptive admission of his own representations on behalf of the passport applicants at the centre of the latest storm.
Indeed, it was left to Joe Higgins to rail against a scheme for "the rotten rich" and their "ill-gotten gains". But the Labour leader did get angry enough to claim the Government was on its "last legs"; and maybe it was this that inspired Mr Ahern, like a boxer demonstrating just how much was left in those legs, to resort to dancing.
In an unscripted aside, he suggested he could go "round the house" if he wanted with the information in Government files. He said nothing about minding the dresser, though, and his remarks caused mild apoplexy in Mr Bruton, who leapt to his feet to ask: "Would you be threatening the House?"
Mr Ahern denied he was doing anything of the sort and cautioned Mr Bruton against upsetting himself. All he meant was that "I could play the innuendo game too." But this only made Mr Bruton madder: "You shouldn't threaten the Opposition," he warned. "Who's being threatened all this week?" retorted Mr Ahern.
As the Taoiseach neared the end of his statement, Jim Higgins came around to whisper something in Mr Bruton's ear, but the Fine Gael leader, straining to follow the debate, brushed his justice spokesman away like a wasp. It was that sort of day.
The only people who weren't tetchy and petulant, it seemed, were the Progressive Democrats. Significantly, Mary Harney and Bobby Molloy rode shotgun with Mr Ahern throughout his speech; and even if Des O'Malley sat as usual half a Chamber away, the relaxed demeanour of his party was saying more than all the angry words.