Sleeping dogs have been let lie for too long

AND so Biffo awakes — although more Sleeping Brutey than Beauty.

Indeed, Brian Cowen was lashing around in the Dáil yesterday like a nightclub bouncer launching strikes in all directions.

After being derided for so long as the Trappist Taoiseach and Comatose Cowen, he came out fighting — and the gaping economic divisions between would-be government partners Fine Gael and Labour provided him with an unmissible target.

And while the Taoiseach’s truculence provided some welcome Dáil sport, it was impossible not to see it as the final twitches of a political corpse.

The only uncertainty left in the tragi-farce that is the Cowen premiership is who will get to read the last rites over it — his own party or the electorate?

The two-and-a-half years of economic disaster he has presided over has often appeared to leave Mr Cowen punch-drunk — if we can use that phrase after the late night/early morning incident at the Galway think-in in September.

But FF-ers were rather suspicious of his sudden return to the fray in bullish Dáil performances and a combative radio interview, as he has re-awoken at least twice so far this year, only to disappear back into bunker slumber soon after.

And talking about Sleeping Beauty, what a little pickle John Gormley has got himself into over his own nocturnal inclinations.

Asleep-On-Duty would be the best way to sum-up the Green leader’s contribution to the now infamous events of the night of Monday, September 29/30, 2008, when the two Brians agreed the bank guarantee and in so doing — effectively — signed away this country’s economic independence and heralded the eventual arrival of our IMF overlords.

And where was Mr Gormley on probably the most momentous night in the history of the state?

Why, he’d gone up the little wooden hill to Snoozie-land and could not be awoken to partake in the panic gripping Government Buildings as the Two Brians were being bullied into the wheeze of turning the future of the state into the repository pit for the outflow pipe from the financial sewerage system that was Ireland’s banking sector.

But in a belated effort to save face, Yawny Gormley says he did not need to be awake at 4.30am when the Two Brians were behaving like the Bananas in Pyjamas, because it had all been broadly decided at a Cabinet meeting on the Sunday before.

“You couldn’t just make a decision on the spur of the moment. You would have to have discussed it for days in advance,” our very own recycled Rip Van Winkle trilled to RTÉ.

And while that version of events may help grumpy Gormo, it drives a coach and horses through the official version of what happened that fateful night when we were told it all had to be decided in such a rush because of the collapsing financial situation.

In unusually straightforward language, the Taoiseach has trashed Gormley’s version of events, telling the Dáil: “No decisions whatever were taken on the Sunday.”

So, Sleepy Greenhead and Sleeping Brutey are telling very different stories about how the most pivotal decision in the country’s history was arrived at.

All of which means the new government in the new year must launch a fast-track probe with judicial powers to swiftly find out — and, if needs be, apportion blame — over whether this nation has been told fairy stories about how it was sleep-walked into financial disaster.