IT was once said of Brian Cowen that he's the sort of politician who'd cross the road in order to get into a scrap.

When you're Taoiseach, however, you have to choose your fights a bit more carefully -- and by backing FAS chief Rody Molloy in the row over the employment authority's lavish expenses, Biffo has ensured that he's going to come out of this one with plenty of cuts and bruises.

Manicure

We've suspected for a long time that something is rotten in the state of FAS, but nothing could have prepared us for the horrific figures that emerged over the weekend.

The State organisation that's supposed to help the disadvantaged find work has been splashing out taxpayers' money on luxury flights, rounds of golf, beauty salons and presents for Government ministers. Words alone cannot convey the sheer scale of what FAS has been up to. You have to use numbers, too -- with €15,000 for a couple of plane tickets to Florida, €942 for a golf game and €410 for a manicure being just a few of the most eye-catching examples.

This blatant abuse of public funds would be an outrage at any time, but at the start of a recession it's a positive scandal. The least Rody Molloy should have done yesterday was to offer a grovelling apology and promise that it would never happen again.

Instead, his blustering interview with Pat Kenny was car crash radio of the worst kind -- and will go down in folklore along with Padraig Flynn's infamous "You should try running three houses sometime!" appearance on the Late Late Show.

At one point Molloy claimed that the money his employees had spent on pay-per-view films in hotel rooms was "chicken feed".

Given that he has an annual salary of €203,000 a year and got a bonus of €35,458 last year that's roughly equivalent to the average industrial wage, it may well be chicken feed to him.

For the people that FAS is supposed to help, however, every euro counts -- and anyone who can't see that isn't fit to be in charge of an employment organisation. So why on earth has Brian Cowen given Molloy his full support, publicly declaring that he's "an excellent public servant ... I know him personally and I've every confidence in him"?

It sounded suspiciously like George Bush telling his Emergency Management chief in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!", just before he fired him -- and it could be just as embarrassing.

Loyalty

Is the Taoiseach acting out of misplaced loyalty, forgetting that his first duty is to make sure that the electorate's money is spent wisely?

Has it got anything to do with the fact that Molloy is a fellow Offaly man? Or is it possible that Cowen's political judgement is simply not all it's been cracked up to be?

If the Taoiseach had been smart, he might even have been able to turn this scandal to his advantage. With a major report on public sector reform due shortly, he could have used this as an example of the outdated practices that need to be cleaned up.

Instead, he's effectively ducked the issue yet again -- casting doubt on whether he really has, in his own favourite phrase, "the bottle for the battle".

If Cowen thinks this is all going over to blow over quickly, he's sadly mistaken.

FAS is now heading for a showdown with the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday by refusing to hand over its own internal audits.

With Fine Gael's young Rottweiler Leo Varadkar already calling for Molloy's resignation, there should soon be blood on the walls.

Cowen should start backpedalling furiously to make sure some of that blood isn't his.

- Andrew Lynch