Pantomime spats undermine anti-doping hearing - but IHRB is still feeling heat

We're more than four hours into the Oireachtas Agriculture Committee's hearings that have been convened to thrash out Jim Bolger's concerns about drug use in Irish racing, but it still wasn't enough for some of the interrogators to pose all the answers they wanted.

Maybe if the various members spent less time regurgitating the same lines of inquiry more ground could have been covered.

Senator Ronan Mullen, who was substituted on to the committee, had already played his part in last week's pantomime spat courtesy of his "my turn, my turn!" tete-a-tete with Fine Gael TD Michael Ring. His final contribution on Tuesday wasn't any more dignified, as he wailed at the chairman Jackie Cahill that it wasn't fair that others who had been granted the opportunity to pose questions at the first session had got a second bite of the cherry this time but that he hadn't.