Patrick O’Donovan boasted at the start of this year that he had the best job in the Government.

“There isn’t a day in the life of an Irish person that is not touched by my department,” he told the Irish Examiner in January.

Now the seat of the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport is empty and the floor in the Cabinet room is carpeted in eggshells. Who’s afraid to speak of the minister’s ill health? Everyone, it seems – unless it’s strictly entre nous, off the record and not for quoting.

Nobody with a shred of sensitivity wants to pore over somebody else’s health adversity in public. That natural reticence was compounded by a sequence of extraordinary events on October 13th when the 49-year-old Limerick politician, who has deep frontal lobe epilepsy, was rushed to intensive care. It happened just hours after he denounced an anonymous Fine Gael Cabinet colleague for questioning if his health condition was affecting his ability to do his job. The events of that day have snowballed into a political whodunnit with the revelation that his party leader, Tánaiste Simon Harris, had phoned O’Donovan shortly before he fell ill while chairing an EU presidency meeting.

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