Globetrotter Bertie gets bogged down at home

BERTIE Ahern roared back into the Dáil Chamber for the first day of term yesterday, basking in a mild orange glow from his recent sell-out tour of India and sporting all the energy of the Hindu god Ganesh.

Ganesh - as we all know - is the elephant-headed master of clarity, wisdom and success.

So the Taoiseach’s pinpoint accuracy with words was soon dazzling the deputies still frazzled from their meagre 41-day Christmas break.

However, the infamous Third Eye the Taoiseach brandished so dashingly in Bangalore last week was wandering dangerously off-course as he seemed to accidentally reveal the existence of a previously unknown, top-secret US detention centre.

When asked for assurances Shannon had not been used to send suspects for torture in Guantanamo Bay, Mr Ahern deployed his extraordinary diction to insist no such extraordinary rendition had occurred.

The Taoiseach teasingly stated: “No prisoners have been transported through Irish airports to Guatemala, or anywhere else.”

Guatemala? Just how many torture camps have the Americans set up over there?

In what may have been a reference to Eastern infusions, Joe Higgins TD squared up to his Socialist rival in the Dáil and suggested “the garlands” had gone to Mr Ahern’s head while he was sunning himself around the sub-continent.

This was just the beginning of Mr Higgins’s onslaught as he had obviously spent the long seasonal vacation rehearsing just the right put-downs to rile Mr Ahern.

In one withering rebuke for dodging questions about the planned privatisation of Aer Lingus, Mr Higgins lashed-out: “The staff at the National Museum got more information out of Clonycavan Man - and the poor man was dead for 2,000 years in a bog - than the Taoiseach has provided today. The Taoiseach is very much alive in front of me, I might call him Neo-Liberal Man.”

Slightly less erudite recourse came from FG with one heckler accusing Mr Ahern of taking “too many breakfasts” in India.

But then that’s always been a problem for Ganesh. He was blessed with wisdom, clarity and success, but also the head of an elephant and body of a rather plump man.

Still, if the TDs repeat the heavy workload they saddled themselves with last year, they’ve got another gruelling 91 days of toil in 2006 in which to sharpen-up their one liners.