Mr Lenihan also earlier defended himself for falling asleep during a telephone link to TV3’s Ireland AM morning programme.
He was due to go live from his hotel bedroom at the Fianna Fáil think-in in Co Cavan when technicians heard him snoring loudly down the line and pulled the item.
“I just slept through the call. That’s what happens to a lot of us,” he said today.
“If I was at home the good lady wife would normally give me an elbow in the ribs and I’d be up like a flash.”
“I wasn’t on the tear, no, no, no. I wasn’t on the tear. You can stay up late talking to colleagues and that kind of stuff. There’s not that much wild drinking done at these events.”
“I obviously answered it in my sleep and said: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the call’.”
He said the annual Ard Fheis events were usually ‘wet’ events.
“The delegates get stuck in, don’t they and enjoy themselves.”
He denied a media report that he was ‘accident-prone’ and insisted he was doing a good job in the Overseas Development Aid department.
Last May he had to apologise after he was overheard in the Dáil referring to the Turkish GAMA workers as ‘kebabs’.