Should we be resigned to more political heads rolling?

DID Enda Kenny not have a spare horse’s head to leave in the garda commissioner’s bed as a warning of his intentions?

Surely, that old Godfather trick would have been only slightly less subtle than sending a senior civil servant to Martin Callinan’s house to effectively tell him the Taoiseach was wondering what to wear to his imminent retirement party.

As usual, it was left to Leo Varadkar to put everything into perspective, with his Vulcanesque logic, as he mused: “I have difficulty getting my head around it.”

But, then, in this strange and twisting tale not much makes sense.

Such as: why is the Attorney General too scared to talk on the telephone to the Taoiseach about bugging?

The answer to that tells you a great deal about what is wrong with this country.

It also begs the question: who is bugging whom, and for what reason?

But alarm bells should have started to ring that this was all about to get very messy, and very confusing, when Finance Minister Michael Noonan announced that the Taoiseach was taking “personal command” of the situation.

Oh dear.

So, after his Sunday evening chat with Attorney General Máire Whelan, Mr Kenny met her to hear what she is too afraid to tell him on the phone — that widespread and systematic taping of telephone conversations, to and from garda stations, had been going on for a quarter of a century.

That the Attorney General had known of this potentially calamitous state of affairs for four months, and not bothered to tell anyone else in the Cabinet, raises yet more questions.

But do not expect any answers, as she reports directly to the Taoiseach and he is supposed to speak for the Attorney General.

And as we found out with his description of how commissioner Callinan “resigned”, Mr Kenny’s grasp of reality may not always be all it should.

When Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin accused him of “sacking” the commissioner by sending the senior civil servant to his house, the Taoiseach fluttered like a wounded butterfly and insisted he was not a liar.

But as Sir Humphrey once put it in the TV show Yes, Minister: “A good speech isn’t one where we can prove he’s telling the truth. It’s one in which nobody else can prove he’s lying.”

And former commissioner Callinan clearly feels like the injured party in all this, if the whispers from “sources close to him” are to be believed.

To borrow Gwyneth Paltrow’s nauseating phrase of the week, the commissioner and his ex-best bud, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, have certainly not enjoyed a squeaky-clean Hollywood-style “conscious uncoupling”, as rancour seems rife.

Ironically, Mr Callinan appeared to be the only one actually doing something about the mass bugging, by having it stopped last November, and expressly alerting Shatter to the unfolding crisis in a letter delivered to the Justice Department on March 10 — yet he seems to be the fall-guy for the mess.

Though the bugging may have major and profound consequences in the courts, it would appear Mr Kenny tried to paper over a serious Cabinet split on the handling of the penalty point/whistle blower/GSOC saga by the commissioner and Mr Shatter.

Though Labour ended up with what they wanted all along — a garda authority to oversee the force — this came about more by accident than strategic design.

Labour’s calls for Mr Callinan to withdraw his appalling remarks, which branded the actions of garda whistleblowers “disgusting”, were sparked by the outspokenness of Mr Varadkar, and the party made it clear on Sunday it would not call for the commissioner’s resignation if he ignored the demand.

Labour figures insisted they were not in the business of “looking for heads” — something that must come as a surprise to former Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue, whom Labour leader Eamon Gilmore hounded from office amid a flurry of expenses controversies.

In truth, this has been the worst week yet endured by this Government and has put serious strain on the Coalition.

It was bad enough for the Taoiseach to decree, from Brussels, that Mr Gilmore and other Ministers must shut up about the garda crisis, but keeping the Tánaiste out of the loop for two days on the bugging controversy is deeply embarrassing for the Labour leader.

Labour Ministers had no choice but to ignore the Taoiseach’s gagging order, a move which again emphasised tensions and weakened Mr Kenny’s authority.

While Mr Shatter was fighting off — for now — demands in the Dáil for his resignation, Mr Varadkar was giving a speech on how the changing status of buildings in Phoenix Park reflected national fortune, and after pointing out how the vice regal residence was now the presidential palace, he noted the zoo kept getting bigger, before musing: “I’m not sure what that says about the country.”

Mr Varadkar knew exactly what it said about the country, even if he did not go as far as to state the obvious — it was feeding time at the zoo, and in order to save Mr Shatter’s skin it appears the commissioner was thrown to the lions.

The (metaphorical) bodies are beginning to mount for Mr Kenny; he dispatched his close confidante and mentor, Frank Flannery, as soon as he proved a political inconvenience; now the commissioner is gone, and it would appear the Taoiseach is growing increasingly impatient with the Justice Minister’s ever-present air of crisis. Is Shatter next to be shafted? But, of course, the Taoiseach insists he did not sack Mr Callinan in order to get himself through a rocky week.

As the master manipulator of Yes, Prime Minister also wisely remarked: “The first rule of politics is never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

Mr Kenny has now officially denied sacking the commissioner on three occasions — what would Sir Humphrey make of that?