Epitome of a professional hit - ruthless, clinical, clean

SKETCH:THIS WAS a professional hit – ruthless, clinical, clean. But the big question today is: Whodunnit? The next-of-kin trooped solemnly on to the plinth last night to face the media. "We are pretty shell-shocked at the moment," said John Gormley, still trying to come to terms with the tragic loss of Trevor Sargent's ministerial career.

Dispatched by an unknown hand, but reading between the lines, John and his party have their suspicions. Under questioning, he refused to rule out his Coalition partner as the possible assassin.

Clustered around him in a show of solidarity, his stony-faced TDs and Senators looked into the distance. These champions of the new media looked like a living Facebook page.

Title? Justice for Trevor.

So whodunit, John? “We don’t want to give any hostages to fortune . . . I’m not going to jump to any conclusions.”

Labour’s Pat Rabbitte wasn’t quite so circumspect. Short of holding up his name in big letters, Pat insinuated that the pawprints of Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern were all over the hit.

If not Dermot, well then, his party. Stung by the loss of one of their own, Rabbitte described the swift and surprise dispatch of the former minister for food as “the empire strikes back”. Trevor never stood a chance. The end came quickly. He was gone in 100 seconds.

On his feet one minute. Career toppled the next.

Never, but never, had they witnessed the like before in Fianna Fáil, where resignations last as long as an old-fashioned wake. All shrieking and keening and rending of garments, with raucous displays of anger and denial, followed by dark intimations of revenge further down the road.

Sargent, on the other hand, took just one minute and 40 seconds to resign.

Sorry. Didn’t mean it. Error of judgment. Goodbye.

Last week, it was death by tweet.

This week, it is death by leak. (Or should that be leek?) Life in Leinster House is beginning to resemble the plot of an Agatha Christie novel.

And now there are four: George, Déirdre, Willie and Trevor.

What next? A political body in the library, yet another knifing in the back in mysterious circumstances? Curiouser and curiouser.

Forget about George Lee. And Déirdre de Búrca. O’Dea is the key.

Fianna Fáil lose a minister. They fight hard to keep him, he fights hard to survive, but in the end he is brought down by a fit of conscience from the Greens.

Never mind that Willie was the author of his own destruction. It wasn’t the Greens who brought him to court, or forced him to swear a false affidavit, or implied that a journalist fabricated a story about him, or said that a political rival was operating a brothel.

They didn’t wind up Senator Eugene Regan and let him off in the Seanad. They didn’t write the Sunday newspaper articles that ignited the O’Dea controversy.

In fact, the Greens held their noses and stood well back. They didn’t make the running at all. Instead, events caught up with them. By last Thursday, if they were to be left with any shred of credibility, they had no choice but to demand the former defence minister’s moustache on a plate.

No, Willie’s downfall was not the fault of the Greens. But they played a part in his downfall, and that, it seems, was reason enough to extract revenge.

So it came to pass that Brian Cowen, acting Minister for Defence, lost a Sargent yesterday. He didn’t bat an eyelid.

Brigadier Biffo knows that war ain’t pretty.

Particularly when Fianna Fáil is manning the trenches.

Then again, maybe the sudden surfacing of a letter that spelled certain resignation for Trevor Sargent, not a week after his party was responsible for the end of O’Dea’s ministerial career, was mere coincidence.

But that’s hard to swallow. “It’s too much of a coincidence,” said Pat Rabbitte, the Hercule Poirot of the Labour Party. “When you look at it circumstantially, I think it points in one direction.” And to think, he added, that Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern was threatening Sinn Féin’s Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin with the files during last week’s confidence motion in O’Dea. “It occurs to me that someone was rooting in the files at the weekend . . .” But it’s all conjecture. Dermot Ahern seems rather pained that he seems to be the man in the frame. He said yesterday evening that the first he heard of Trevor’s inappropriate communication with the garda was on the lunchtime news. In fact, he sees Sargent as “a friend”.

The beginning of the end for decent, honourable Trevor came at midday, with the publication of the Evening Heraldand its front page headline: "Minister Asked Gardaí to Drop Case". Almost immediately, Sargent confirmed he had written such a letter on behalf of a constituent, three years ago. His fate was sealed. A Dáil statement scheduled for 5pm.

He spoke before the appointed time, his fellow Green TDs in the chamber to witness the moment. Trevor stood and began his statement. There wasn’t a peep from anyone, on any side of the house. Ahern sat, expressionless. A far cry from his exploits of the previous week.

Soon to be former food minister Sargent was brief and to the point. He did wrong. He resigned. He left the chamber, his colleagues leaving with him. There was silence. They seemed stunned on the Fianna Fáil benches. They couldn’t manage one gratuitous vegetable joke between them.

What? No blood. No recrimination? No fingers gouging out the wooden desk nor heels burning rubber as the condemned man is dragged, roaring innocence, from the chamber?

They were supposed to be discussing the Petroleum Bill. Nothing happened. Deputies whispered quietly to each other. Brian Cowen looked pensive.

Eventually, Minister Conor Lenihan screeched in and got the debate under way. As a Fianna Fáil man, he mustn’t have been expecting Trevor to have gone so quickly, or as quietly.

But is this the end? Probably not. What happened yesterday stinks of dirty tricks. The Greens couldn’t bring themselves to absolve their partners of any complicity in Trevor’s downfall.

If nothing else, it appears the trust is gone.

They may never know whodunnit – but that doesn’t stop them thinking they do.