DUBLIN - Six senior Irish government ministers were forced to call in the army after spending a sweaty half hour trapped in a tiny lift.
Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who spent 30 minutes cooped up with cabinet colleagues, including Finance Minister Brian Cowen, said they had passed the time with "all sorts of jokes" but the atmosphere soon soured.
"Literally it's only standing room. You can't move, to be honest," Ahern told RTE radio on Wednesday.
"After about 20 minutes it wasn't very nice, it was getting quite hot," he said of his time spent with Cowen and the ministers for health, education, agriculture and communications.
Having fruitlessly sounded the lift's alarm and used mobile phones to try to reach a civil servant, the ministers called a colleague who had not squeezed in with them as they left a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
"One or other of us thought we'd call in (Defence Minister) Willie O'Dea ... We decided we might as well call in the army," Ahern said.
Irish media revelled in the mishap and were quick to point to parallels with the country's creaking transport network.
"Half the hands that should be on the tiller of the nation get busy dialling," Irish Times columnist Miriam Lord wrote in a blow-by-blow account. "If the opposition were to call a vote at that moment, the government would fall."
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