Answers worthy of ‘Yes Minister’ as efforts to get at the truth fail miserably

"Will you inform the committee what happened that night, very clearly and in plain English?"

It’s the question that is refusing to go away: what happened on that mysterious March evening when the Taoiseach dispatched a high-ranking civil servant to the home of Martin Callinan, before his shock resignation as Garda Commissioner the next morning.

But when the chairman of the Oireachtas Justice Committee posed the question yesterday the response he got would — in the words of Independent TD , Finian McGrath — have “won an award for Yes Minister.”