Stormy scenes with Captain Kirk at the helm

THE Taoiseach appeared dangerously out of his depth as the waves of crisis surged all around him.

Soldiers patrolled the corridors of Leinster House as the poorly paid ushers they were replacing massed at the gates in protest.

It was a surreal scene, but not nearly as bizarre as the Government’s evident belief it could sail through proceedings with barely an acknowledgement that half the country was under water.

Opposition demands for an emergency debate on the devastation wreaking havoc beyond the Pale were haughtily brushed aside by Dáil Ceann Comhairle Seamus Kirk with the support of schoolboy barracking from the FF benches.

The previously pacific and subdued chamber then exploded into a torrent of noise and fury as Enda Kenny and Labour’s Ciarán Lynch led outrage over the national parliament not being able to spare time to properly debate an unprecedented national crisis which had swept through the west and south, leaving 80,000 people without running water in its wake.

Mr Kirk refused to give way and allow a previously time-tabled, and extremely limited, opposition motion on the need for better flood prevention to be replaced with a real assessment of the disaster.

The Fine Gael leader was unusually forceful as he demanded the Dáil attempted to look relevant to the real world. Yes, he did go off on one of those strange Enda tangents and started talking about the Dunkirk landings (and, erm, shouldn’t that be the Dunkirk evacuations, Enda?) but at least he knew which way the tide of public opinion was flowing.

The newly appointed Ceann Comhairle seemed to have trouble forgetting he was no longer chairman of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party as he repeatedly shot down opposition demands for the Oireachtas to actually acknowledge the worst natural disaster to hit the country in decades.

Amid the uproar Jim O’Keefe rose to make a highly dignified intervention, noting that in more than 30 years in the house he had only previously called for a such an emergency debate once before and that was to deal with Northern Ireland.

The Government front bench was now getting jittery as it finally dawned how absurd this situation would look to people whose homes were under five feet of water, and the Taoiseach suddenly gave way to the demands like a collapsing dam.

The Ceann Comhairle looked washed up by the turn of the tide as it appeared to the whole chamber that Captain Kirk was scarcely in command of the good ship Dáil Éireann.

Hardly an interlude to lift the standing of a Ceann Comhairle’s office still reeling from the recently terminated occupancy of John O’Donoghue. At least he was just out of the country a lot, not out of touch with the country.

And as the country was either flooding or revolting, it should not have been that hard to get a handle on the national mood.

The “day of action” by hospital, school and other public sector workers certainly saw a lot of cross-border action in the Christmas shopping stakes, but the picket line snaking across the gates of Leinster House stayed there all day.

And it did not seem made up of the bloated State service fat cats attempting to save their perks and Mercs, but the canteen staff and the ushers looking down the barrel of another raid on their meagre wages in the looming budget.

Being civil servants, the pickets were very, well, civil, but Labour TDs in particular felt the need to linger with them to ease their lefty consciences before entering “scab city” – much to the derision of the Sinn Féin deputies who refused to do so.

Inside the strikers had hit TDs where it hurts most – the Dáil bar was shut for the first time in living memory.