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Are you suffering from nervous hyper-tension? Do you have constricting chest pains that make you feel as if your ribcage is wrapped around with metal cables which are being tightened by 2 circus strong men dressed in leotards pulling in opposite directions? Do you have the feeling that if something doesn’t stop this tension at once the majority of your body will get permanently severed from your significant (and significantly smaller) lower half?

Well now the solution is at hand. All you need is whatever Michael McDowell took last night (and then injected into his party colleagues) in order to put all that fussing about Bertie’s irregular personal finance behind him and get on with the job of trying to win next year’s election.

Maybe the apothecary was around in the dark hours with an array of different coloured compounds. I can imagine him now, pummelling the powders in his trusty pestle and mortar until they turn in to an odd smelling paste and then presenting the concoction to a relieved McDowell, who with usual canniness as a wordsmith pronounces ‘ah, the elixir of government’.

‘I call it ‘AH’FORGETTABOU’IT’ and it’s guaranteed to relieved even the most elaborately pre-fabricated pang of conscience in any government minister’, pitches in the midnight pharmacologist turned marketeer.

Also, according to breakingnews: Mr McDowell “said he would be continuing to talk to the Taoiseach about the matter and made it clear that the PDs and Fianna Fáil had a job to do in government”.