By and large, it’s been a really good four or five weeks for the Oireachtas.

Those of us who spend most of our days watching the Oireachtas and what goes on inside it think enviously of our parliamentary colleagues in Westminster. it seems every time there’s any public scandal in Britain, however minor, someone is immediately hauled before a committee of MPs to discuss it. Last week the heads of the major electricity companies were brought in to appear before MPs to discuss why energy connections had been disrupted during the massive storms in the UK just after Christmas (spoiler: it was, amazingly, because of storm damage to the power lines).

That doesn’t seem to happen in Ireland - or, at least, it didn’t. Aside from the fact that we’re almost blasé about power cuts during extreme weather, we just don’t seem to have cultivated a culture where the reflexive reaction is to have a public hearing. If anything, our usual response is to send someone onto a current affairs programme on TV or radio - farming out the idea of accountability to a professional interrogator instead of someone with an actual mandate to ask questions on behalf of the public.

At least, that was the case until December - when the Public Accounts Committee appeared to find its feet. The HSE had already instigated its audit of the Section 38 agencies, and questions had arisen about the pay levels of some senior managers at the Central Remedial Clinic. Its directors were brought in for what should have been a routine hearing: it became scandalous only when Paul Kiely first disclosed a €200,000 payoff (less than half of his actual lump sum) and alleged that the Mater Hospital was charging the CRC a substantial six-figure sum to manage a non-existent pension fund (plainly untrue).

Since then it’s been a rampant few weeks for committees. The PAC began to move so quickly that it was even able to hear from the Chairman and CEO of NAMA, barely four days after newspaper headlines had alleged NAMA was leaking information to some developers. The story appeared on the Monday papers: by the end of the week there was little left for the Sunday broadsheets to rake over, such was the degree to which the PAC had been able to put the public at ease.

The first session of Topical Issues of the new year had Fergus O’Dowd discussing Irish Water, Richard Bruton discussing the job losses at Liebherr, and Kathleen Lynch discussing primary care centres and ambulance response times. Four genuinely pressing issues of the day, all dealt with by ministers attached to the appropriate department. The misfiring system finally appeared to be working.

The Environment committee did an admirable job at trying to get to the bottom of the consultant spending at Irish Water. On the same day, the Health committee worked an admission from the head of the HSE that the government had interfered to change the language of the HSE’s Service Plan for 2014. The PAC - in hindsight, perhaps to its own detriment - did a good job at mopping up the loose ends on Irish Water and dealing with some broader questions the following day. Its interrogation of Brian Conlan the following week was a demolition: a remorseless interrogation so comprehensive that one couldn’t help feel a pinch of sympathy for the utterly devastated Mr Conlan, even though his filleting was largely the result of his own own imperfect command of the actions of the board upon which he sat.

Its questioning of St Vincent’s Hospital gave us the odd spectre of people describing special measures to “swing around into compliance” with the same rules they believed they were already following. The Environment committee, the same week, gave Owen Keegan an efficient but sufficient questioning on the status of the Poolbeg incinerator.

But then we come to the penalty points issue, which itself resulted from a couple of questions - firstly, why the Oireachtas Justice Committee was given evidence of alleged corruption in the penalty points, but chose to pass it onto the Public Accounts Committee; and secondly, whether the PAC shot itself in the foot by agreeing to accept them.

This is the crux issue: the PAC has been plainly flirting along the boundaries of its remit in the last few weeks, especially on the penalty points system. Some members were privately baffled as to why the PAC had demanded a hearing with the Irish Water management when the Environment committee had already secured an audience. On the same vein, if the penalty points dossier had been allowed to sit with the Justice committee to which it was originally sent, we could have been looking at a visit from the whistleblowers this week - or, at the very least, a legal challenge from the Garda Commissioner trying to stop it. The fact that the dossier was transferred to the PAC - seemingly on the basis that it was already poking around on the topic - is what has led to today’s move from Alan Shatter.

Whether you agree with the PAC’s most recent behaviour is not the primary concern. It’s been a phenomenal few weeks for committees bringing in the people who are supposed to be responsible to the public but who, for years, have been given only facetious scrutiny. We should all be hoping that the roadblock being put in the way of the PAC doesn’t ruin this great run of form.

Gavan Reilly is Today FM's political correspondent. twitter.com/gavreilly