Garret Fitzgerald was on the panel and slipped in a question to Brian Lenihan (Snr) – the FF candidate for the Presidency – about a series of phonecalls made late at night to Aras an Uachtarain in the early 1980s when Fitzgerald was with the President seeking a dissolution of the Dail. The then President, Patrick Hillery, was reportedly outraged that anyone should seek to interfere with his office by trying to persuade him not to grant the dissolution in favour of allowing Charles J. Haughey form a government without an election.

As the Americans like to put it, Lenihan was caught out in a ‘misstatement’; the PDS(in coalition with FF at the time) demanded his head; Haughey sacked him as a Minister when he refused to resign; the FF Presidential Election Campaign (Director of Elections, one Bertie Ahern) degenerated into chaos; Lenihan lost the election and Mary Robinson became our first female President.