John Deasy. A conundrum. A scrambled egg. A maze. A jumble. An enigma.
Earlier this month we saw him being stubborn bad when he challenged Enda Kenny and rained (there's a less polite verb that could go here) all over Fine Gael's New Year campaign.
And before all that, we saw him being stubborn very very bad when he lit up the famour fag in the Dáil bar, costing him his front bench position, and rendering as a still-birth his glorious future ministerial career.
But yesterday we saw him being stubborn very very good indeed. He followed up Carl O'Brien's scoop in the Irish Times (and we're still very sore about that today) with a superlative performance on Morning Ireland this morning.
Perhaps it's his schooling in the tough brutish and partisan world of Capitol Hill poltics. But Deasy railroaded his way through all the guff this morning and cut for the chase. With a complete rejection of the HSE's wan excuse that it doesn't comment on individual cases, he asked the direct, pertinent questions that needed to be asked.
Why was this young girl not put in care? Why did did this vulnerable girl die? Did the HSE did all it could have done to prevent this awful tragedy?
It was commendable. Like an extreme athlete, the Waterford politician doesn't seem to engage publicly unless he's putting his neck on the block.