Nostalgia time at Leaders' Questions as old-favourites get another outing

DAIL SKETCH:OLD BERTIE Hubbard (stuck in a cupboard) wasn't in the chamber to witness his successor administering the Last Rites to his e-voting dream.

What? The former taoiseach hasn’t been let out yet? That explains his absence.

It’s probably for the best.

Leaders’ Questions proved a trip down memory lane for nostalgia buffs yesterday.

First, Continuity Inda and The Breakaway Biffo – supposedly improved versions of previous incarnations – engaged on the subject of waste in the HSE.

Spending overruns in the health service were once a staple of leaders’ questions. So when Deputy Kenny rose to his feet and resurrected the topic, it was a sign that things had returned to normal in the Dáil after a hectic number of months.

Waste in the public service was embraced like an unwelcome old friend.

But it was the (as yet) unreconstructed Eamon Gilmore who really had us pining for the good times, when Bertie and Seánie were pals and only loo-lahs failed to see the funny side of a taoiseach’s tribunal tales.

The Labour leader returned to what proved a happy hunting ground for his predecessor: the government’s useless electronic voting machines. Pat Rabbitte used to have great fun taunting Bertie about them.

Nothing had changed yesterday when Eamon took on Brian.

Oh, but we remember those halcyon pre-incarceration days, when Taoiseach Ahern inhabited a different sort of cabinet and was battling to stop us making a show of ourselves in front of the neighbours with our “Luddite” approach to e-voting.

By not adopting the new technology “this country will move into the 21st century being a laughing stock with our stupid aul pencils,” he told the Dáil in 2007.

How right he was – if a little out on the detail.

We still have no electronic voting system, and true, we are a laughing stock in Europe, and America too.

However – and this is where Bertie’s prediction goes awry – it has nothing to do how with how we vote.

Europe and the rest couldn’t care less about that.

No, they’re sniggering because of Brian Cowen’s Garglegate episode in Galway and they’re falling around the place at the notion of our former prime minister doing a TV advert for a tabloid newspaper while sitting inside a kitchen press.

Although, looking on the bright side in these straitened times, thanks to The Biff and The Bert at least some Irish stock is soaring, even if it’s mortifyingly of the laughing variety.

More nostalgia! Didn’t Old Bertie Hubbard exist in the equivalent of a broom cupboard when he was minister for finance? It’s why his concerned friends collected money to buy him a place more suited to his exalted position – like a wardrobe.

The only difference between now and the sob stories told to the Mahon tribunal about impoverished Bertie’s accommodation crisis is that his safe in St Luke’s was far better stocked with money than his News of the World kitchen press is with food.

Little had changed yesterday from the time Ahern was in charge and waffling to a Labour leader about e-voting, to current exchanges between Brian Cowen and Eamon Gilmore.

Pat Rabbitte told Taoiseach Bertie that the money spent on those voting machines could have paid for clean water in Galway, among other things.

Eamon Gilmore told the current Taoiseach that the e-voting millions would cover the new prescription charges.

Bertie accused Pat of playing politics with the issue. Brian accused Eamon of playing politics with the issue. Bertie waffled. So did Brian. Both were asked to apologise. Neither did.

Here’s Brian, a model of clarity, just like his predecessor: “The costs that have been associated with this are of the order that the deputy has pointed out and, clearly, they will not be used in the country and the question of the disposal is under consideration.”

Old Bertie Hubbard said the fiasco had nothing to do with him or his government. “It was your fault because you objected to it. If you had taken a mature attitude . . . but politically you didn’t agree with it and got a few people in to find flaws with it.”

Pat Rabbitte said he was fed up with the taoiseach’s “give up your aul pencils’ raiméis”. This didn’t bother Bertie, who blithely blamed the opposition for his government’s botched attempt to bring in e-voting.

In Brian Cowen’s defence, he didn’t revert to the laughing stock line of argument.

Even he had enough cop on to know that one would never work.

He couldn’t say what will be done with the infernal machines – although according to Minister John Gormley in April of last year a taskforce was being set up to “oversee the disposal”.

Perhaps they might refurbish the machines as capsule residences for victims of the recession.

They could present the first one to Old Bertie Hubbard – after the kitchen cupboard, he’ll be trading up.