Det Ahern to investigate the back-stabbing in Dail crime scene

Dáil Sketch: The Dáil has witnessed a lot of smoke-and-dagger stuff lately, as the Taoiseach might say. So it was no surprise yesterday to discover that the place had turned into a crime scene overnight. The outline of Séamus Brennan was drawn in chalk on the floor of the chamber, and a search was on to find out who had stabbed him in the back.

As Pat Rabbitte returned predictably to the Cabinet divisions on Aer Rianta, Bertie Ahern gravely announced that a Garda investigation was under way into the leaking of the Government memo quoted on Tuesday by the Labour leader. Sensing a bluff, Mr Rabbitte denied identifying the document as a Government memo. But he had reckoned without the deductive powers of Drumcondra's Hercule Poirot.

"Unfortunately for you, Monsieur le Lapin," began the Taoiseach (although not in those exact words), "the text you used was only in the Government memorandum." It was a fair cop, and Mr Rabbitte conceded as much. Yet he was not prepared to go peacefully, especially when the badly wounded Minister for Transport challenged him to name the memo's source.

Not content that Mr Brennan had been stabbed in the back, the Labour leader stabbed him in the front as well. "Never mind where I got the memo," he snapped, "\ I might ask you questions about what you got from Michael O'Leary." Among the bitter exchanges that followed, Dermot Ahern asked Mr Rabbitte what HE got from Frank Dunlop. And in the uproar over who got what, the public gallery got a sore ear.

The Government's problems didn't end with the leak. With one investigation under way, the Opposition wanted another into the Minister of Defence's attempted coup in Nenagh on Monday night, when he dissociated himself from the Hanly Report. Trevor Sargent was worried about the Government's lack of cohesion. But Detective Inspector Ahern dismissed the Sargent's worries, assuring him that as far as Hanly was concerned, Mr Smith "totally, totally" supported it.

At this, the chamber totally, totally cracked up. Because sitting two seats away from him, Mr Smith heard the Taoiseach's comments with the look of a man who had just swallowed the Hanly Report accidentally. Such was the suppressed animation in his features that it would have been no surprise if he sprang a leak himself. But somehow he kept a straight face, and, on this occasion, said nothing.

Even so, the Government was badly in need of EU cohesion funds yesterday, with the Brennan stabbing and the Smith mutiny following fast upon the the smoking rebellion and the Punchestown row.

Far from confidentiality and collective responsibility, the Cabinet has more public opinions than a taxi rank. And so rife has the internal dissent been that the Taoiseach even contradicted himself.

Returning to the leak investigation, he said it would first be a matter for the secretary general of the Department of Transport, who could bring in the gardaí if necessary. In this he appeared to be distancing himself from his suggestion moments earlier that a Garda inquiry was already under way. But if this Government stands for anything, it's freedom of speech.