His official title is Minister for Tourism, Sport & Recreation. But in Jim McDaid's hands, the portfolio was always going to become Fun & Games.

This week, as he flew off to the Olympics, yet another round in his verbal tennis tournament with the OCI broke out in an argument about hospitality funding in Sydney. The Olympic Council of Ireland alleged that the Minister had refused to cough up £30,000 to slake their guests' thirst Down Under. But a spokesman for the Minister said there was no record of any such request.

To those of us grappling with fishermen's protests and spiralling petrol prices back home, it all sounded like a lot of big boys crying into their beer.

Though his political career has been short compared to most of his contemporaries', it has been packed with controversy. In the past year alone, he has been embroiled in a lather of public disputes.

It is said in Jim McDaid's defence that the OCI has always been a difficult opponent in the Tourism & Sports field, and that former minister Bernard Allen also winced at the hardball style of its president, Pat Hickey. It is, however, the Minister's job to keep the lid on potential problems, and this minister's track record suggests that the 50-year-old former minor footballer and captain of a UCG team that won the Collingwood Cup is not finding the going easy.

The dispute over accreditation to the Olympics for the Minister's party caused some to suggest that here was a jet-setting lover of the high life trying to maximise the promise of an exotic junket. However, his wife Marguerite, who has been living in England since the couple separated, says that a freebie would be the last thing on his mind.

``He hates travel absolutely detests it,'' she says. ``He wouldn't be there at all if he didn't have to be. He almost went down in an aircraft in America last year and he took it philosophically, that if he was going to go, he was going to go. He travels for work. He hasn't taken a holiday since 1995.''

Sources in his Department reject an assertion by the OCI that its formal invitation to Minister McDaid to be its guest at the Sydney Olympics went unanswered. They say that it was issued orally by Pat Hickey during a meeting on the first day Jim McDaid was in office. That was back in 1997. The OCI has since furnished the Department with a copy of a letter dated July of that year in which the invitation was repeated in writing, though it was not signed by Pat Hickey.

However, the Department itself has no record of the letter and the sources concede that it could have been lost when the files for the Sports portfolio were transferred from the Department of Education to its present location in Kildare Street.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, what lies at the heart of the row is the Minister's poor personal relationship with the OCI. Last April, after he decided to mediate between the OCI and the Athletics Association of Ireland in the tug-o-war over sports gear, he didn't help matters by referring to ``the blazers'' during Dail questions. It was while he was on a tourism promotion trip to the American west coast that he heard about Pat Hickey's declaration that, if the Minister wished to go to the Olympics, he could go there as a tourist.

In the cabinet, he is close to Charlie McCreevy, with whom he shares a passion for horse racing and a place on Fianna Fail's liberal wing with his views on abortion and heroin. In the run-up to the last abortion referendum, the then back-bencher received an avalanche of hate mail after revealing that he had provided patients with abortion information. His car was stoned and its windows smashed. He called his hate mail correspondents ``anti-Christs''.

He also managed to ruffle conservative feathers by espousing the legal availability of heroin for the relief of pain in terminally ill patients. In at least one case, he offered to acquire the pharmaceutical equivalent of heroin, diamorphine, from an authorised supplier in Northern Ireland for a woman who was dying in the Republic a perfectly legal step, but one that many GPs shy away from. In fact, he is regarded as the unofficial resident doctor in Leinster House, assuming responsibility for keeping the medical room in stock and dispensing aspirin to his stressed-out deputies.

At a Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting earlier this year, he treated colleague John Moloney when he collapsed and arranged a wheelchair to take him from the fifth floor of the House.

Jim McDaid's life away from politics has been almost as untidy as his public career. In 1995 a turning point in his personal life he publicly admitted for the first time that he had a drink problem and checked into St John of God Hospital in Stillorgan for a treatment programme. Until then his favourite tipple had been brandy.

It was at this time that he shot to fame when Charlie Haughey nominated the new TD for Donegal North East to the Department of Defence. The Opposition, however, made major capital out of a photograph taken outside Dublin's Four Courts on the day a judge ruled that the Maze escaper, James Pius Clarke, should not be extradited. In the background of the celebratory photograph was one James McDaid, smiling broadly. The fact that Clarke's mother was a patient in his Letterkenny medical practice counted for nought. Fine Gael was vitriolic in its attack on him. The outcome was that his name went down in history as the shortest-lived minister on record when, under pressure from the PDs, he handed back his portfolio.

It was a traumatic time for him and his family. Marguerite McDaid recalls driving to RTE with her husband the following night and remarking to him: ``It's like having an operation without an anaesthetic.''

While the Minister is said to relate exceptionally well to the opposite sex, his wife rejects suggestions that he is something of a Romeo (``He's a man's man,'' she insists). Considered attractive by many women, he was voted Best Dressed TD in 1994 when he revealed that his wardrobe contained 197 neck ties and nine Magee suits. His distinctive Cuban heels and gold jewellery are as much part of his image as the mobile phone he permanently holds to his ear.

``He loves women,'' agrees a female in the Department. ``He works well with them and I suspect he feels more comfortable with them than with men.'' Since separating from his wife, he has been seen in the company of several different women, including newscaster Anne Doyle and former Magill manager Eileen Pearson.

But not all women succumb to his slightly awkward charm. His former party colleague Maire Geoghegan-Quinn was said not to be close to him when she was a government minister. Likewise, Fine Gael's Madeline Taylor-Quinn did not seek to win him over when, as spokeswoman on Defence, she led the attack on his failed nomination to the cabinet, saying it evoked memories of the gun-running days of 1970. ``Madame La Guillotine,'' the Government benches roared back at her across the Dail chamber.

It was another woman whose complaint to the Irish Medical Council brought about one of the darkest days of his medical career. On foot of a complaint by Maureen Bonar-Scally, a partner in his Donegal doctor's practice, that he had failed to attend to treat patients on a particular Sunday, he was found guilty of professional misconduct by the Fitness to Practise Committee in 1995.

It was later reported that the TD and GP had returned from the Cheltenham race festival the evening before he failed to show up at the clinic. Jim McDaid is well known for his gambling escapades, both at the horse and dog track. He came home from Cheltenham last year with a windfall of £75,000 and followed it up at this year's Galway races with another handsome win.

Some people believe his biggest weakness is that he allows his heart to rule his head. ``He's not a huge topic of conversation in here,'' says a Department official. ``He's not the worst of ministers, nor is he the best. He's polite and he doesn't bear a grudge.''

He has only been a TD since 1989 and, last time out, split his vote to deliver two Fianna Failers, bringing Cecilia Keaveney in with him. But his reluctance to devote time to humdrum constituency work may have allowed his own seat to grow vulnerable.

Certain rituals leave him cold and he refuses to bend to them, even if it could cost him valuable votes. When he first became Sports Minister, he vowed that he would never do a Charlie Haughey by indulging in a lap of honour to celebrate an Irish success. He got into trouble over that when he was notably absent from Dublin Airport for Michelle Smith's return from the Atlanta Games. It remains to be seen whether, this time round, the Minister for Fun & Games will have anything to celebrate.