In 1999 Jim Mitchell was chairman of the Public Accounts Committee when it conducted an important and uncommonly efficient inquiry into the wholesale avoidance of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (Dirt) by Irish banks.

For years, half the country were stashing their savings in deposit accounts that were supposedly “non-resident” and therefore exempt from tax on the interest. Senior banking and revenue executives were summoned by the committee to explain why they allowed this fiction to continue, at an eventual cost of €100m to the state.

The hearings were broadcast on TG4 and on the internet. It was a cheap, fast inquiry and was followed by a speedy, hard-hitting report. Nobody ever dreamt that Irish parliamentarians could be this efficient.

One day, in the middle of a side meeting, Mitchell received a phone call. He turned his back on his colleagues as he spoke briefly with his doctor. It was bad news. His cancer was back and, because a number of his siblings had died from the same disease, they both knew his chances of beating it were non-existent. He’d received a death sentence. Mitchell didn’t flinch, hung up, and returned immediately to his work. His colleagues had no idea what had just happened. It was brave, selfless and an act of heroism: public service over private troubles.

I couldn’t help thinking of him after I’d flung the Sunday Independent across the room last Sunday morning. Eoghan Harris, appointed to the Seanad by Bertie Ahern, informed us that senator Jim Walsh, the government whip, had called him in west Cork to wish him well and assure him his vote wasn’t needed to get the banks’ bailout bill passed in the upper house. Harris declared himself “glad to be able to avoid the cabin fever around Leinster House”. He decided to go for a walk instead.

Senator, I am sorry you are ill and I wish you well, too. But you are writing newspaper columns about long walks, hearty meals and the pleasures of staying up all night to watch the American presidential election debates. You are not supposed to be “glad” you don’t have to show up when the most important piece of legislation in decades is being debated. Your opinions on the American elections may be fascinating, but as a highly paid legislator, your opinions on the bailout should be on the record of the Seanad and not in a newspaper.

If your absence is truly unavoidable due to illness, an expression of regret rather than relief would be appropriate.

One week earlier Anne Harris complained in the same newspaper that Fine Gael’s decision to deny voting pairs to government TDs, as a protest against the taoiseach’s refusal to hold a full debate on the economy, was “hysterical” and “playing politics”. Why is it war on presenteeism from the Sunday Independent? What do they want — TDs and senators to text in their votes as if they were watching a reality TV show?

We pay our public representatives pretty well. Have our expectations sunk so low that even showing up is asking too much?

Fortunately, the taoiseach is taking the matter more seriously and gave Kerry North TD Tom McEllistrim and Donegal North East’s Jim McDaid a dressing-down in front of their colleagues over their absence from the same debate. Rightly so. McEllistrim had been canvassing in his constituency. I’ve no idea what McDaid’s excuse was.

I’m still shaking my head at the antics of Fine Gael’s James Bannon. He failed to show for the Dail’s opening week because he forgot the holidays were over. He forgot? So what is the penalty? A fine? Standing in the corner of the Dail with a dunce’s cap on?

Usually, politics is an irrelevant side-show where politicians, no matter how sincere or hardworking, make little difference. But in the past fortnight, politics was back in the spotlight and democracies around the world needed politicians to step up, rather than back, from the crisis we face. We don’t need politicians when everything is going well. When everything goes wrong, as it has now, turning up is a minimum requirement.

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