A day of two Biffos and Enda’s live gig

THE searing heat and dust storms swirling through the white tent city gave the National Ploughing Championships the look of a refugee camp as Brian Cowen descended from the skies in his helicopter.

But the Taoiseach was not here to hand out food aid, he was here to pat bullocks. The first to feel Mr Cowen’s smack of firm government was Maximus in the Charolais tent.

Maximus seemed blase about meeting the political elite and certainly behaved better than the heifer next to him. She showed her disdain for the paparazzi melee the Taoiseach had tossed her into, by letting out the most enormous addition to Ireland’s greenhouse gas pollution as soon as Mr Cowen had slipped away.

However, her handler delighted in announcing that to mark the glorious occasion, the then unnamed heifer would now be known as “Biffo” forever more — which may not be that long judging by the proximity to the tent of several burger stands. With Fine Gael refusing to play Dáil ball and pair with the FF ruffians when the Oireachtas returns today, an awkward encounter was avoided when the Taoiseach and Enda Kenny came within about ten feet of each other, but decided ignoring that fact was the best course open as neither acknowledged the other. It is obviously going to be a spiky session.

The Oireachtas tent was proving a surprisingly big draw on its debut. Not only was the big screen showing the greatest hits of the Dáil Agricultural Committee on a continuous loop, but the excitement ratcheted up even higher with a live performance by Mr Kenny.

Well, not everyone was happy judging by the reaction of a woman and her eight-year-old son who wandered in while the FG leader was in mid-flow. “Who is he mammy?” asked the boy. “He’s useless,” came her reply as she sharply turned on her heels and abruptly ended her child’s Blueshirt contamination.

Enda didn’t care, he had the tent eating out of his hands with macho talk of “politics being a blood sport” until that thorny issue of Far Eastern chickens raised it ugly little head. One audience member was very angry that Taiwanese chickens were coming over here pretending to be Irish chickens, and wanted to know what Enda was going to do about it.

Unfortunately, Enda did not offer a poultry-based extension of Fine Gael’s back of an envelope idea to send jobless migrant workers home with a dole lump sum — maybe something along the lines of offering the chickens six months’ corn if they went back to Taiwan? — and the questioner did not look pleased.

Luckily though, if she felt let down by her leaders, all she had to do was pick up one of the hundreds of “A Day In The Life Of A TD” leaflets littering the place to realise how hard our Dáil deputies toil for us.

It opens with the gushing tribute: “It may be just a couple more days to the weekend, but for a TD Wednesday is the busiest day of the week.”

Well, as TDs only do two full days a week in the Dáil — and then only for about 30 weeks of the year — Wednesday does not have a lot of competition. The leaflet follows sultry-sounding TD Sarah around Leinster House. Sarah is quite a sexy sort of deputy and spends her time discussing plans for “new skate parks” and catching up with her right-on buddies from Asia Aid.

After a hectic day of telephone interviews and question-asking, the reader is told that by 1am Sarah is “tired, but happy” as she settles down with the climate change bill.

Yeah right, at 1am there are certainly a lot of TDs looking “tired, but happy” in Leinster House, but they are usually settling down with their bar bill.

It proved to be a day of two Biffos, the Taoiseach headed back to the new Dáil session, then a breakfast anti-poverty launch with Bono at the UN in New York followed by an Anglo-Irish summit, while Biffo the heifer’s intray consisted mainly of trying to avoid ending up in two buns with relish and onions.