Lioness Burton slinks away, saving her prey for another day

LIKE a restless lioness, Joan Burton stalked her prey with ruthless patience — knowing that she would soon feed again on the wounded political carcass before her.

Brian Cowen was limping through Leader’s Questions reasonably competently, keeping a lid on the anger, and boring the opposition into muted disinterest under the camouflage of his usual soulless economic jargon — “inter-generation solidarity in the market place” being one of his catchier sound-bites of the day.

It was nearly all over.

Then suddenly, from the long grass of the Labour benches, Joan broke cover and struck — sending the Taoiseach into an agonised howl and plunging the chamber into noise and confusion with all scrambling to be heard in the ensuing melee.

The antipathy between the pair — dating back to the years she shadowed him in the finance brief and the disdain he treated her with in that role — is legendary in Leinster House and it just took one word from her to send him into a rage.

“When?” she demanded mockingly, in reference to the Taoiseach’s local election campaign announcement that the fabled green shoots of recovery would soon be appearing.

Ms Burton knew she had lit the blue touch paper and now just sat back and waited for the Taoiseach to explode with indignation and self-justification.

Where seconds earlier all had been pacific with the Taoiseach — as his anger management lessons appeared to be working far more effectively than his economic management ones — now we were suddenly adrift in a raging sea as he laid into the opposition for leading us towards an Icelandic-style economic collapse.

As he has presided over the starkest industrial crash seen in any Western nation since the era of Hitler, that was certainly some claim and sent the opposition benches into uproar.

“You’ve put the country on its knees! On its knees!” Fine Gael’s Seán Barrett roared back at him.

But judging by the CSO’s calculations that the economy shrank by a shocking 12% in the first quarter of this year and unemployment has hit yet another all time high, perhaps the deputy was being too generous.

As gloom continues to unfold unabated, maybe we will look back on this as a golden period and wistfully remark: “D’you remember the good old days when we were still on our knees — before we fell flat on our national backside? Happy times!”

The Taoiseach formed a big fat zero sign with his fingers to ram home his point — neatly summarising with the hand gesture what he thought of his critics and what they thought of him.

“Oh, now the shouting starts!” the Taoiseach barked, as the benches opposite him erupted like Monkey Island at Fota Wildlife Park in response to the accusations he had thrown at them in his carefully timed attack — during the Taoiseach’s final answer so none of the other party leaders would be able to officially strike back at him.

Ms Burton looked on with studied relish as the Taoiseach was shouted down, while on his own benches a wicked smile crossed the lips of Mary Hanafin as the exchanges reached fever pitch.

Maybe she was smiling because she knew the Taoiseach had slipped the opposition the seasonally adjusted unemployment figures, rather than the real ones.

This meant the number of human casualties so far taken by the slump just sounded really appalling — rather than genuinely outrageous. But the Taoiseach — never very good with figures — did not get away with the little numerical slight of hand for long as the as the opposition angrily accused him of trying to deliberately mislead them and the nation.

Eamon Gilmore derided the Taoiseach’s claim that unemployment was still rising, but more slowly than before. “That’s like saying we are still sinking, but sinking more slowly,” the Labour leader told him.

Even Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny was stirred into life by the cacophony of noise around him as he announced with somewhat startling directness: “We are not proposing to screw taxpayers!”

A promise from Enda which will no doubt be a relief to all taxpayers on a number of different levels.

As the House descended into further mayhem the sitting had to be suspended by an exasperated Ceann Comhairle — the despairing ranger of this particular political jungle reduced to chiding the unruly mob before him with the rebuke: “This is not Puck Fair!”

The Australian parliamentary delegation in the visitors gallery looked puzzled by this reference to Kerry’s goat crowning festival, and reviewing the chaos around them, they could easily have been forgiven for thinking: “What the Puck?”

Amid the uproar Ms Burton slunk quietly away from the hunting ground, the lioness was finally sated and retired to the shadows readying herself for when she would once more torment her prey.