His testicles are everywhere. Or should that be tentacles? Bertie Ahern was a constant presence in Irish life last week even if we were spared direct exposure to his musings and meanderings, which these days seem to be reserved for high-paying Arabs. In a just-published memoir of his time at the heart of the Labour Party in Britain, Peter Mandelson went into some detail about the peace process, his version differing in several places from Ahern's recollections in his own autobiography (the one with the misleading blurb on the cover of the paperback edition). Meanwhile, Celia Larkin, Ahern's former lover, became the latest victim of the economic collapse caused by her ex's mismanagement of the country. Her beauty salon closed after valiant efforts on her behalf to keep it in business and save the jobs of her employees. A few days after she announced her bad news, the criminal John Gilligan proclaimed in court that he'd won his money on the horses. Where, I thought to myself, had I heard that one before?

Back at the ranch where Ahern had once been the head cowboy, the Seanad was doing the state some service by barring Ivor Callely, one of Ahern's Seanad nominees, from attending the chamber for 20 working days – about seven weeks in the parallel universe occupied by our busy Oireachtas members. Callely's crime was to come up with an expenses fiddle so blatant that even his fellow senators had to look away in disgust. His explanations were Ahern-like in their complexity and codology, not to mention the abject self-pity. If anything, 20 days seemed a bit lenient. The punishment should have been accompanied by a demand for some of the money back.

My first reaction when I heard that Callely was muttering darkly about his options was that he should take a leaf from the book of the Louth County Board: stop whingeing, take his beating and get on with it. But the comparison was a gross injustice to the people of Louth who, after the initial shock of realising that life is not fair sometimes, got on with things. With the exception of the few drooling headbangers who pursued the referee across Croke Park, they conducted themselves with honour last Sunday. They weren't responsible for what happened subsequently.

Callely, of course, was the architect of his own disgrace. He made no serious attempt to engage with the Seanad investigation into his expense applications. Indeed, he appeared to treat the whole thing with contempt. In fairness to him, he does seem to have become slightly unhinged since the voters of Dublin North Central failed to re-elect him at the last election, and that might explain some of his bizarre behaviour during the 160-minute hearing. But a mid-life crisis does not excuse the contemptuous nature of his performance – the misquoting of Francis of Assisi, the bastardisation of familiar quotes ("the early bird, they say, gets the name for early rising"), and the exhumation of pointless old ones: "Yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery". That was pure Callely, and pure Fianna Fáil.

Ivor Callely has always been the purest manifestation of modern Fianna Fáil. The caricature of gombeen culture was that it was predominantly rural, but Callely – in all his pinstriped presumption – brought it right into the heart of the capital. And for a while it worked. The voters of Dublin North Central loved him, and voted for him in their thousands, until it turned out that when he was chairman of the Eastern Heath Board in the early 1990s he had his house decorated by a company which also had a contract to refurbish the board's headquarters. Protesting his innocence, he resigned as junior minister and subsequently lost his Dáil seat.

And that, really, should have been the end of Callely. Until Bertie Ahern rescued his career by awarding him a Seanad sinecure on the day he also appointed his horse to the Seanad (or was it his Harris?). Everything – the excessive expense claims, last week's Seanad investigation – subsequently flows from that decision. Callely was damaged goods in 2007, but Ahern brought him back from the dead to live on as the personification of his dodgy politics. Last week may have been a personal blow to Callely, and another nail in the coffin of Irish politics, but it was also a small reminder of the legacy of Bertie Ahern. He hasn't gone away, you know. And we're all the worse off for that.

Bow down before me... if you're a woman

It's becoming increasingly difficult to see why any self-respecting woman would have anything to do with the Catholic church. The latest pronouncement from the Vatican, which makes the attempted ordination of women one of the most serious crimes in ecclesiastical law, and puts it on a par with the sexual abuse of children, is one of its most worryingly bonkers yet. Deeply misogynistic – and premised on the notion of women as second-class citizens – it also suggests that despite everything we've learned over the last few years, the Vatican still doesn't fully accept the damage its priests have done to millions of people worldwide. It seems unlikely, under the current pope at least, that it ever will.

ddoyle@tribune.ie