On your bike Eamon, that’s enough of your peddlin’

THE good news was that Eamon Gilmore thought he had finally found the much fabled road to democratic socialism, the bad news was he’d taken a wrong turn off the road to personal dignity to get there.

“Is there nothing you wouldn’t do for a photo shoot?” TV3’s fearless news woman Ursula Halligan demanded of the Labour leader as he uncomfortably peddled a poster-bike the wrong way up a bus lane while being pushed by the party’s equally perturbed looking Dublin South by-election candidate, Senator Alex White.

“No, this is the limit!”Mr Gilmore breathlessly answered, the folly of what he was attempting to do now etched plainly across his face.

In a desperate bid to try and regain some decorum and a much-needed sense of purpose, the would-be Tánaiste-in-waiting, added: “I’m peddling Alex White all the way to Leinster House!” as he tried to maintain the grimmest looking of fixed smiles, battling the light drizzle and definite upward incline as he did so.

Unfortunately, in a rather ominous metaphor for Labour’s election hopes, he missed the gate to Leinster House and came to a clanking stop, tantalisingly short of Government Buildings.

“I hope this is legal!” he shouted at a bemused looking garda who tried to pretend the whole bizarre little spectacle was not actually happening on his watch.

It had certainly been a visually arresting incident, surreally reminiscent of one of those speeded-up Benny Hill sketches where our hero is chased around a park by scantily-clad women – except in this case it looked like Mr Gilmore was being chased around Merrion Gardens by a scantily clad senator in an attempt to stop the George Lee juggernaut rolling over all opposition in Dublin South.

Clambering from the wreckage of the photo-op debacle, struggling to retain his gravitas – not to mention his breath – Mr Gilmore joked to his aide: “If I look a d*** after this....”

The aide stared at the floor with an uneasy smile.

As distressed looking as it was, at least Mr Gilmore’s exit from the low-lying contraption was slightly more edifying than the increasing desperate attempts by the Greens to exit their low-polling entrapment with Fianna Fáil, which now sees them positioning themselves as the enemy within pronouncing a swathe of policies they backed “disasters”.

As an election tactic it looks as rickety and unconvincing as Mr Gilmore careering against the traffic on a poster-bike.

But as the Labour leader wobbled away from the ill-judged pursuit, he could at least comfort himself with the knowledge it had not quite been a political PR stunt disaster to rival the time Margaret Thatcher cuddled a calf which then promptly died – but it came close.