Others have not been so lucky, but Leo, the spilled doctor, survives.

The quality of mercy was definitely strained, but it didn’t matter.

Fianna Fáil covered her nose and extended it, the leader of Fine Gael accepted and survived in this dangerous government.

Others weren’t so lucky.

Cabinet member sends a confidential government document to a friend. It is clearly marked as such on the top sheet. Ministers have been given marching orders for less.

“What part of CONFIDENTIAL, NOT TO CIRCULATE, does Leo Varadkar not understand?” Róisín Shortall of the Social Democrats tweeted while the Dáil debate on his mishandling of restricted information was still continuing.

Silly Soc Dem. It was she who did not understand, even though the Tánaiste took a long time to explain, why the kind of behavior that would cause most of his teammates to leave on jig time is not a dismissible offense when he it is the guilty.

Varadkar admitted that he would now do things differently, in hindsight, and apologized for his “error in judgment” upon being discovered by Village magazine over the weekend. He duly adhered to the slogan de jour and admitted that what he did “was not best practice.” On the bright side, practice makes perfect, so you obviously intend to improve.

As he explained, there is confidential and then confidential. Some things are more confidential than others. Secret documents are often discussed as “non-documents” during important conversations, while informal words in relevant ears always occur in political circles. “In fact, little would be done without them.”

In the same way, “there are friends and there are friends,” he said, showing Dáil pushing the former hard into the center of this controversy under a two-story building.

In the same way there is a Cork taoiseach and there is a taoiseach. On at least three occasions, Tánaiste Varadkar was erroneously referred to on camera as Taoiseach.

Interestingly, he took it well.

Varadkar was regretful but confident, sincere but cautious

Varadkar was in trouble on Tuesday when he had to enter the House to explain himself. And yet, there was no sense of immediate danger about his situation, even if the Opposition was furious at his arrogant approach to confidentiality and was eager to yank him a couple of pegs about it.

But it wasn’t going to happen, unless more information emerged to topple him from his lofty position. That did not materialize.

Varadkar was repentant but confident, sincere but cautious. After his opening statement, in which he repeated in more detail the narrative released by all his ministerial colleagues at Fine Gael in the previous two days, he participated in a robust question and answer session for over an hour.

Later, the leader of the Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, said that he had responded to all that was asked of him and that the matter was closed.