O’Dea no nearer resurrection after Lent in political wilderness

HE spent Lent in the wilderness but former minister Willie O’Dea still cannot figure out what went wrong.

As recently as Ash Wednesday, he remained the people’s champion: the small man sent to sit among the powerful and defend his downtrodden brothers.

But the next day the sun had set on his Cabinet career. His world was split in two.

Eleven other Fianna Fáil Cabinet members had forsaken him to appease a baying mob in the Green Party.

And speaking on Good Friday, Mr O’Dea admitted he did not understand how it happened. He was still baffled as to why his verbal stone-throwing over prostitutes in Limerick had turned him into a political pariah.

The drinks company Magners would not even return his calls when he tried to move heaven and earth to re-fix the Munster versus Leinster match to a day when alcohol could be served.

But both he and his followers have to come to terms with the cross he must now carry.

“I happened to be walking up O’Connell Street in Dublin yesterday and a lot of people whom I’d never spoken to in my life who would recognise me from the newspapers or television stopped me and asked me what exactly, why exactly, did I have to resign,” he said.

“I said ‘I’m still trying to figure it out myself quite frankly, you know’. But in due course all will be revealed. Maybe some day we’ll all understand it.”

On Newstalk’s lunchtime show yesterday he offered thoughts on the hordes of recently converted rugby fans travelling to Limerick to buy alcohol on a holy day and said people were always drawn towards “forbidden fruit”.

Asked if one day he would again ascend to the right hand of the Taoiseach, Mr O’Dea was suitably philosophical.

“That’s something to be determined in the future,” he sighed.