Keeping up with the Go-Go merry-go-round
Due to the deputy’s, ahem, rather exotically unpredictable nature, he is more commonly known as Go-Go and lived-up to the name with the delightful wheeze of launching his bid to be Dublin’s first directly elected mayor on top of a ferris wheel.
Except, of course, that with Go-Go nothing is quite what it seems, and — with his head firmly stuck in the clouds — Paul insisted he was still making his mind up about running.
But from the dizzy heights of our mid-air political pod we were soon on to the stream of consciousness roller coaster ride that is a Go-Go press conference.
Paul wondered aloud whether he should run at all as it was unlikely he’d get enough votes to win. But those who know Go-Go must fear he’s selling himself short as Go-Go has a good shot at 25% of the gay vote as he once mused he might be 25% gay — although he has never divulged which 25% of himself he was talking about.
But after buying a porn mag and having a flick through pictures of naked men, Go-Go decided he was hetero after all.
Go-Go does slightly unusual things like that, such as when he crawled around the floor of a public meeting pretending to have some sort of seizure in order to get attention, and — most infamously — when he delivered that high-brow Dáil putdown we would expect from an education spokesman and snarled across the chamber with full force venom: “F*** you, Deputy Stagg! F*** you!”
But the only F-words he used in his press conference were Fianna Fáil as he excitedly told reporters he’d heard the party might be running Pat “The Cope” Gallagher again in the Donegal South West by-election — before declaring that this news was “off the record”.
Memo to Go-Go: Nothing is off the record when you have a TV crew and eight reporters in your face.
Go-Go clearly feels that Mr Gallagher is some kind of FF yo-yo as the poor man was shifted out of the Dáil and into the European Parliament last year because he was the only hope the party had of retaining a North Western Brussels berth — and now he is seemingly under pressure to quit Europe to try and reclaim the seat he left vacant last time out. Fianna Fáil is a very funny party.
Go-Go then went on to suggest the Government could be toppled by the budget before insisting on no return to tuition fees before 2012 by way of getting to the supposed point of the whole shenanigans at Dublin’s Point complex by launching the Greens’ consultation paper on how the mayor’s office would work.
And what would happen if the feedback from Dubliners was overwhelmingly negative to the idea — would the mayoralty move be scrapped? Er, no, said Go-Go, they’d plough on regardless. Don’t you just love Green grassroots democracy?
Though Go-Go had invited the media to join him 100ft off the ground there was still no sign of the long-awaited Climate Change Bill his party promised would save the Earth and was their primary reason for being in Government.
Maybe Go-Go did not realise a big wheel would provide a cruel, but fitting, metaphor for the Green Party — it goes around and around in circles and gets nowhere.
