Is there a doctor in the House? Sadly, there are two ...

WHILE Alan Shatter was obsessing about Dr Who, the IMF had a far more scary medic in their sights — Health Minister Dr James Reilly.

For the international money lords dealing with Reilly, it was less a case of Dr Who? than Dr Why? — as in ‘why is this guy still in office?’

Meanwhile, on ‘Planet Shatter’, the law-and-order supremo abandoned the fight against crime to declare himself “Minister Responsible for Time”, as he advised people to watch the new series of Dr Who while putting their clocks forward. Back on planet Earth, the IMF were getting twitchy about the focus of this bizarrely distracted little government.

Appalled at stroke specialist, Dr Reilly’s broken promises to cut budgets, after he failed to introduce the most perfunctory of measures, such as switching to generic drugs instead of the far more expensive branded variety, the IMF has given the Health Minister a massive vote of no-confidence.

Reilly must now go through the very public humiliation of reporting to the IMF every month. They will keep a check on his spending, so it does not explode out of control again, as it did last year with an overrun of €360m.

The issue of Dr Reilly seeming to have the numerical equivalent of dyslexia would not matter so much, apart from the two stubborn little facts that: he is responsible for the second-biggest budget in government; and he sees nothing wrong with picking on the disabled, and most vulnerable in society, for cuts when he needs to make up for his own mistakes in letting the finances run out of control.

It is hardly surprising that Cabinet colleague, Pat Rabbitte, pointedly refused to endorse Reilly as the best man for the job, noting, instead: “He’s the best minister in the job, at the moment.”

Not that any of this had an impact on Dr-Do-Little-But-Mess-Things-Up himself.

Indeed, Reilly is so thick-skinned that even a rogue, North Korean nuclear bomb would probably just bounce off him as his ardent apologist-in-chief, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, bleats: “There’s nothing to see here, lads.”

In truly bombastic style, Reilly fronted-up the IMF put-down by insisting it was just the news he had been waiting to hear, as there is nothing more he loves than “transparency”.

That revelation produced more giggles than laughing gas.

We all remember Reilly’s love of transparency when he was forced to ‘explain’ how two sites that just happened to be in his own constituency were suddenly catapulted onto the primary-care shortlist the night before it was unveiled.

Despite being accused of stroke politics by his departing deputy minister, Roisín Shortall, as she walked out of government in disgust, Reilly insisted that the fact the decision would help his re-election chances was merely a freak coincidence, as he helpfully outlined the criteria used in the site selection to the Dáil.

“I have laid it out three or four times to you — the criteria. They’re quite extensive criteria and, because all of them act in different ways, it’s a bit like a multiplier.

“One and one makes two, and two and two make four, but four by four makes 16, and not four and four makes eight, and so it is with this.

“It’s a logistical, logarithmic progression, so there is nothing, there is nothing simple about it.”

What could be more transparent than that?

Perhaps the IMF could do us another favour, while they are focusing on Reilly, by asking the good doctor why he has still not complied with a High Court ruling and is exposed as a debtor?

Or, indeed, why he sees no conflict of interest in having investments in private care beds, while he is the minister responsible for closing public care beds?

Where’s the natural justice in that?

But, more importantly, where is the Justice Minister?

Oh yes, he’s cowering behind the sofa, scared the cybermen might leap out of the TV and grab him. Mr Shatter is 62.

But let us indulge his Dr Who fantasy world as the self-proclaimed ‘Minister For Time’ transports us across the galaxy’s dimensional gravity in his very own, police-box TARDIS.

Where would we like him to take us?

Why not back in time, to five years ago this week?

For that was the moment Bertie Ahern finally realised the Mahon corruption probe had done for him, and he suddenly quit as Taoiseach, just as the economic bubble he had inflated was about to burst big-style.

The tribunal refused to believe Ahern’s evidence regarding the sterling and dollar amounts sloshing around the 23 bank accounts he operated while finance minister, in the early 1990s, and he was exposed as a liar.

Ahern’s ‘explanations’ for the curious activities in his myriad bank accounts could be summed-up as: “I won it on the gee gees”; “These men I didn’t really know made me take it in Manchester”; “It was from two spontaneous digouts, a year apart, from two separate sets of friends, who had no knowledge of each other, but wanted to give the finance minister enough for a deposit on a house.”

Now, five years since he fell from power, and 12 months since the tribunal judges issued their damning assessment of him, we still do not know where Ahern really got the money from.

What can he have to hide?

Reilly, Shatter, Ahern — they fit into a long line of self-obsessed Irish politicians.

Some — Ahern — have done far more damage to the country than others, but all exist in a strange world of their own making.

Maybe inter-galactic truth-seeker, Shatter, could turn his phasers to stun and yank up the old TARDIS, to go back and find out exactly what did happen with Ahern and the loot.

Though, in this scenario, TARDIS would not stand for ‘time and relative dimension in space’, but, rather, ‘Taoiseach Ahern reveals dollar interaction shenanigans’.

Now, that really would be fantasy.