Labour volcano spews hot molten palaver over Galway

WHILE the rest of the Labour Party clearly knew it was meeting in Galway, new recruit Jerry Cowley seemed to believe he had pitched-up in Sycophant City.

After being thrown out on his ear as an independent TD by the voters of Mayo at the last election, Mr Cowley became so emotional at being taken in by his “new family”, his outpourings would have made a toad toadying to King Toad blush with embarrassment.

After heaping a level of praise onto Eamon Gilmore rarely heard this side of a North Korean Workers Party mass rally, Mr Cowley then showered the audience with his love.

“Oh happy days!” he exclaimed from the podium after being unveiled as the party’s great new hope in the wildly un-socialist west.

“I’m a new man! With a spring in my step. I feel 10 years younger! I’ve had a eureka moment as good as if I’d won the Lotto! Thank God I’ve found my true home at last!” he exclaimed.

And why shouldn’t the 2007 poll failure feel at home here – after all, no one knows quite as much about losing elections as the Labour Party does.

But that was then and this is now, and in sun-dappled Galway the socialists were surging, their new-found romance with the voters convincing them that finally a happy ending was at hand, banishing to the back of their minds, the reality that there has never been a heart more repeatedly broken in Irish politics than a left-wing one.

But power comes at a price, and the Labourites know they must hold their noses and consummate a shotgun marriage to the Blueshirt beasts when the fateful day comes.

And this could be far trickier than it seems as many of the delegates clearly hate Fine Gael even more than they do Fianna Fáil – though the sight of activists from the Labour Gay, Lesbian, Bi and Transgender Group wearing T-shirts with the slogan “I’ll never kiss a blueshirt!” is unlikely to cause Enda Kenny to lose much sleep.

But with the phoney friendliness of the Mullingar accord dead and buried, one of the loudest roars of approval of the weekend came when school principal and would-be Dublin TD Aodhán O Ríordáin told the delegates: “The only thing that frightens me more than having Mary Coughlan as minister for education is having a Fine Gael minister for education.”

Whatever they are like in the classroom, though, it must be said Fine Gael do a better warm-up for the leader’s conference speech than Labour, but then this is mainly because it is the moment the Blueshirts unleash Michael Ring from the attic and allow him to bombard the audience with a surrealist verbal onslaught that has to be witnessed to believed.

All the poor Labour delegates got was a couple of dreary videos – one perfectly respectable: “blah, blah, jobs, blah, blah recovery, blah blah Fianna Fáil are Satan’s little helpers...”, while the other was decidedly dodgy, boasting a soundtrack of Duran Duran and Thin Lizzy and all the production values of one of those hostage tapes that occasionally turn-up on Al Jazeera.

Surprisingly, it was the usually mild-mannered Mary Upton who delivered the most politically cutting remark of the conference when she noted that the Icelandic volcano explosion had done more to halt mass emigration in two days than the Government had done in two years.

But then again, even the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano can’t compete in the gushing stakes with Mr Cowley.