Taoiseach flirts with reality as he utters the B-word

BRIAN COWEN took a tentative step into reality yesterday and accepted the looming tax and slash spectacular is indeed a budget.

The change of tack was significant as the Government had seemed to believe it could avoid the B-word completely and hoodwink the public with a distracting label such as “the magic pixie dust adjustment” to cover its fifth emergency cuts package in nine months.

Well done Taoiseach, we’ve got the name, all we need now is a date. You promised it would be by the end of March. Labour’s Eamon Gilmore has accused you of shifting your story every time you speak on the economy, so could we know which day in March Brian Lenihan will be putting his hands in our pockets again?

Oh, it will be the first week of April now, you say?

Not a good start is it, moving the goal posts already? Never mind, could we have the actual date in April, it might make this all look a little less panicky, you know, calm the markets and all that.

Sadly, no date was forthcoming — but then numbers have never been this Government’s strong point.

Mr Cowen cut a sorry looking figure as he came under intense fire in the Dáil during Leader’s Questions yesterday, but sorry was the furthest word from his lips.

Buoyed by the way the British opposition has fingered Gordon Brown for that country’s economic woes — hammering home his continuous state of emergency measures that never quite measure up, and his responsibility for public finances as chancellor of the exchequer — Fine Gael and Labour are determined to make the charge stick here too as they demand apologies for what they claim is Mr Cowen’s central role in our national downfall.

But maybe their harsh approach is a tad too counter-factual. Leinster House corridors are alive with conspiracy theories that our apparent national descent into despair is all part of Mr Cowen’s secret masterplan to lift Ireland out of the mire in one fell swoop.

Surely those in charge can’t really be this inept, they muse. It must be a cunning ruse — the worse things look, the more Angela Merkel and the EU have no choice but to come in and save us as we barge through pesky Poles and sly Slovaks to get a massive chunk of Brussels’ multi- billion euro bailout fund before it all disappears into Eastern Europe.

The theory may sound far-fetched, but then much odder things have been said in the Dáil during these economic clashes — usually by Green TD Paul Gogarty.

How best to describe Mr Gogarty to those sadly not yet aware of his stream of consciousness, as expressed in an extraordinary Hot Press interview in which he compared his party to a prostitute being “screwed” by Fianna Fáil?

It’s probably kindest to say that Mr Gogarty possesses one of the most unusual political minds of our time.

His insights into the inner turmoil of Enda Kenny, which he helpfully shared with the rest of the Dáil, are certainly arresting.

“Does Deputy Kenny sleep soundly at night?” Gogarty enquired before answering his own question: “Devil a bit of it. He dreams vivid dreams, and in those dreams he is already Taoiseach — ‘I’m Enda. I’m the Taoiseach. I’m the gaffer.’ He snores like a lion but when he wakes up, the lion fades and disappears. What pops out instead? A mouse — a mouse that is afraid to do the right thing.”

Okay Paul, maybe you’d like a nice sit down before you continue? No?

“The Greens are no Messiah or saviour and sometimes we are up our own backsides as well — that is true. I have often said and done things I should be ashamed of.”

Have you Paul? Really?