Invigorated by the voltage, I went off to work, forgetting to tell the man in my life about the shocking start to my day, which meant that when he stepped from the shower and laid a wet hand directly on the rail itself (as opposed to on the towel), the fillings in his teeth fell out and the top of his head smoked. As a result, he arrived at work in full blowtorch mode, demanding to know why I hadn't warned him.

"The problem is you two don't have a house file, " a co-worker observed. "Like Celia."

Good point. One of the leastnoticed aspects of Celia Larkin's evidence to the Mahon tribunal was where herself and the senior counsel didn't reach amity about some bill or other. They didn't reach amity about much, let's be honest, possibly because the senior counsel had his surname amputated by Celia, who redefined him as Henry the Pedantic.

Henry got Celia to remember a call from the Taoiseach, after they'd split up, asking her about a particular bill. Henry wanted to know if Celia had a copy of the bill. Celia told Henry, with some asperity, that she had told Bertie (the asperity, in this case, was implied rather than demonstrated) that everything to do with the little house in Beresford Corner/Place/Niche was in the house file.

Seated in the body of the tribunal hall, my self-esteem dribbled away to nothing. I've never had a house file. Worse, the house file option never occurred to me, despite its obvious advantages as a method of coping with The Male Question. The Male Question varies from day to day, but the common vocal characteristic is intense irritation and suspicion, and the proper female response is the unexpressed bad thought.

"Where the hell are my blue socks?" the man asks.

Wherever you put them, which could be bloody anywhere, including the microwave, is the unexpressed response.

"What did you do with the screwdriver?" he calls.

Something so pornographic, it would put you off your porridge, the woman doesn't say.

"Have we any eggs?" he demands.

What? You think I laid some during the night? she thinks.

The ultimate solution to all this bottled aggro, of course, is the house file and the employment of the quietly confident tone Celia uses: the answer will certainly be found therein. Every taoiseach should have a house file.

Rather more importantly, every taoiseach should have a house. A state house. The president has a house with quite a big back garden in the form of the Phoenix Park, together with a staff of about 30.

And rightly so. Yet the Taoiseach, who . . . no offence to President McAleese . . . tends to be somewhat busier than the average Uachtarain, and somewhat more important in terms of the laws shaping our lives, does not.

In this deficit, Ireland is unusual.

Britain's prime minister has a house so famous, everybody knows its number. The British go further, providing the house next door, No 11, for the duration, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

According to novelist Hunter Davies, who visited No 10 in an unsuccessful attempt to become Cherie Blair's autobiographical ghost-writer, the official residence during the Blair years was like a tip. Davies wasn't being critical.

This was a family home with little Leo's toys all over the floor and the bookshelves fallen off their supports so that a landslide of literature occupied the lower end.

The advantage the Blairs had was that whenever No 10 got too messy, they could de-camp to Chequers, the other prime ministerial residence, in order to let the cleaners do a blitz in the first domicile.

A properly staffed taoiseach's residence would allow him (or her) to invite visiting eminences and private friends to lunch or dinner.

It would increase, rather than decrease, their privacy. It would allow the gardai to do away with having to build nasty little security kennels for their officers on security duty. If it was a beautiful old building (like Gandon's in Kinsealy), it would make a mute statement about Irish architectural tradition. If it was a newly commissioned building, it could be the outcome of an architectural contest, the keynote specifications of which would be that it had a minimal carbon footprint and met John Gormley's new climate-change building standards.

An official taoiseach's residence would offer a modest showcase for Irish art, an opportunity for a gardener like Bertie Ahern to display his hanging baskets in a fitting context, and the possibility of a delicious recurring replay of what happened when the Kennedys moved into the White House: media reports of the advanced state of nausea induced in Jacqueline Kennedy by the tasteless chintzy relics-of-olddecency left behind by Mamie Eisenhower.

Even when a wealthy taoiseach such as Albert Reynolds provides his own elegant city-centre residence, it can cause problems.

Neighbours of the Reynolds family, during his period in office, reportedly resented the level of traffic his presence brought to their classy little enclave. Because of an almost continuous state of crisis during the Reynolds years, visitors arrived at his front door at all hours of the day and night, disturbing the area with sweeping car headlights, engine noise and cheery nocturnal greetings and partings.

A purpose-built prime ministerial residence is an idea whose time has come, now that the ESRI has confirmed that a rake of construction workers will be available to build it. Starting now.