"Having long suspected that Leinster House is teeming with the undead, we now have proof in that the finance minister is obliged to use garlic to ward them off" Eithne Tynan, Radio Critic

We are a nation both united and divided by bad breath. Economist David McWilliams claims in his latest book, 'The Passion of the McWilliams', that finance minister Brian Lenihan carries garlic around and is incessantly peeling and eating it. (Is that a bulb of garlic in your pocket or are you just relieved that Nama has passed the committee stage?)

It seemed a fanciful allegation by McWilliams, but lo and behold, minister of state Pat Carey confirmed it on Marian Finucane (RTE Radio One) last Sunday. In the course of rubbishing McWilliams' claim to be the new messiah, instructing the Pharisee in his kitchen with his Labrador, Carey said: "Look, Brian Lenihan talked to an awful lot of people, and he still does. And by the way, he constantly chews garlic."

Marian Finucane was positively flabbergasted at this, and entered into some delicate enquiries about halitosis. "If someone eats garlic all the time, doesn't it...? Does it mean that people move farther and farther away from him all the time?" she asked.

Such was her evident amazement that Carey at once felt the need to back-pedal. "Ah, he doesn't do it all the time but he does it from time to time," he said. Perhaps, with a junior politician's typically flimsy grasp of news values, he feared that the next morning's front pages would read: 'Carey accuses finance minister of witchcraft'. Or perhaps long experience in Fianna Fáil has taught him that you could lose the whip for suggesting that anyone in the party has any idiosyncrasies whatsoever (well, anyone except Willie O'Dea, who is past help in that respect).

At any rate, it was too late, and Brian Lenihan's garlic fetish is on the record. Having long suspected that Leinster House is teeming with the undead, we now have absolute proof of it, in that the finance minister is obliged to use garlic to ward them off.

Lenihan himself had been a guest that morning on Miriam Meets..., along with his auntie, Mary O'Rourke. He gave his own description of the kitchen session. He said: "I was with my civil servants yesterday. I was working yesterday afternoon and we were all laughing about David McWilliams." This seemed a bit snide, especially for someone who eats so much garlic as to be probably rather shunned in company. You would think he ought to be keen to keep in with what acquaintances he has. But yea, verily, thrice he described his encounter with McWilliams, and then the cock crowed twice.

The exaggerated significance of this spat between McWilliams and the finance minister was such that McWilliams himself was invited on Marian Finucane the same morning to explain himself – and indeed, to explain to us his significance in all our lives. However, we've heard quite enough from David McWilliams for the duration so let's not bother reviewing what was said.

Let's stick with bad breath instead. On Thursday, Morning Ireland celebrated its 25th anniversary with a live show in front of a studio audience. Fortunately they resisted the current craze for recording in shop windows. (A person can't so much as shop for a toaster these days without stumbling into a radio broadcast.) But the acoustics in the RTE Concert Orchestra studio were so peculiar that all the participants sounded as if they were coming to us from The Other Side, or at the very least a sepulchre. At the sound of the audience clapping, Les Dawson's line came to mind: "Who crept in the crypt and clapped and crept out again?"

Among the special guests was the president, Mary McAleese, who said not very much in a great many words, bless her. She promised to switch off the lights in Áras an Uachtarain to save 12.5% on her household allowance. (Those diaspora lights of Mary Robinson's are in­candescent.) She also said the "counsel of despair" was no use to anyone, though as it was radio, I can't be sure she wasn't referring to the "council of despair", which is apparently a subcommittee of the OECD.

Also on the programme were Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Garret FitzGerald, who was taoiseach when the first Morning Ireland was broadcast, when coincidentally we were also down the Swanee. The two had a bit of a barney abut taxation, but never mind that. Let's get back to the bad breath.

The final guest was David Hanly, who along with David Davin Power, was the first Morning Ireland presenter. Davin Power recalled that it had been Hanly's custom to eat "a very steamy curry with lots of garlic" the night before the programme. It seems things got so bad in the tiny studio that one government minister lodged a formal complaint, he said. Another of the undead, no doubt, but which?

etynan@tribune.ie