Tánaiste’s tirade backfires as Kathleen shows true girl power

SADLY, it would seem Minister for Mass Unemployment Mary Coughlan is determined to do for women power what she has already done for manpower in this country – reduce it greatly.

While the Dáil does languish behind such states as Latvia in terms of female representation, and no one could ever call it feminist friendly, it’s undoubtedly still a bad move to bandy about terms such as “sexism” unless you have the offending chauvinistic piglet firmly by his curly little pink tail.

Otherwise, you just sound a bit silly, and do the cause of female equality no favours into the bargain.

Such was the case yesterday when Ms Coughlan berated a male TD for flinging a “condescending, sexist remark” across the chamber at her, merely because he pointed out that she may not be up to the rigours of her job.

Now, if doubting the Tánaiste’s abilities to master the key enterprise and employment brief is indeed an expression of gender prejudice rather than received fact, then there must be an awful lot of women sexists in this country too.

Maybe all the reshuffle kerfuffle was getting to Ms Coughlan, but her lambasting of Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan did seem a tad harsh, not to mention counter-productive.

This is the Tánaiste, after all, who did not know how many EU commissioners each member state had – despite the proposed loss of such representatives being just about the only thing in the whole Lisbon referendum campaign that voters actually connected with.

And we cannot really let that time go unremarked upon when she was talking about the fabled “smart economy” and mixed up Albert Einstein with Charles Darwin.

Or when Ms Coughlan, as a fluent Irish speaker, got the name of Fianna Fáil’s partner in Government wrong when she referred to the Greens as Gaeilge as “the Vegetables” – then again, maybe she was on to something there…

Labour’s Kathleen Lynch was on a much firmer gender politics platform when she blasted the bleatings of Ceann Comhairle Seamus Kirk right out of her path as she insisted on bringing up the Michael Neary affair despite the Dáil speaker’s repeated – and increasingly futile – attempts to stop her.

“This is my time, not yours,” the Cork North Central TD told him sternly, before inquiring: “Is it only women you have a problem with?”

“No, it’s not a problem,” he mumbled sheepishly.

“Then, is it just the Labour Party you have a problem with, or is it the opposition in general?” Ms Lynch demanded to know.

“No, absolutely not,” the former chairman of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party blurted out meekly in his defence.

“Then, I’d like to ask my question without interruption, thank you very much,” she thundered.

The Ceann Comhairle, now crushed into silence, finally realised who was in charge of the situation and wisely gave up any further attempts at resistance.