A heave you just couldn’t believe in

TWO men desperately grabbing for the fag-end of Fianna Fáil as it smashes down to be stubbed out in the ashtray of political history.

It was the heave you could never really believe.

Was Martin resigned to defeat? Probably not, but he resigned anyway — shame it was a week too late.

Offering his resignation Sunday and getting talked out of it by the very Taoiseach he thought too inadequate to lead the country wounded him from word go and left him looking like a wimp.

If he’d had the nerve to quit then, or better still move against the Taoiseach when he could have fatally wounded him last Thursday, Martin would not now look such a loser — however dignified he was in defeat.

Ironically, Brian Lenihan comes out of the shambles with his reputation as shredded as Martin’s — the man he was desperate to stop stealing the top job from him.

Mr Lenihan’s performance yesterday was more slippery than a flock of seagulls in the Gulf of Mexico at the height of the BP oil well disaster.

Plotting, me? Ambitious, me? Conspiratorial, me? Talking out of both sides of my mouth, me? Yes, you, Mr Lenihan — the Minister for Finance revealed as the Minister for Connivance.

As Mr Lenihan hinted the job of Taoiseach might be a tad beneath him, he insisted he was too busy sorting out the nation’s finances to meddle in such party piffle. Really? Mr Lenihan didn’t seem too engrossed in counter-cyclical economic theorem last Wednesday night when he was holding court in the Dáil bar at the very moment talk of a heave first took flight.

The trio of would-be tin-pot Taoiseachs was completed by Mary Hanafin who after talking tough turned on her kitten heels, spoke for barely a minute at the parliamentary party showdown and — despite every indication to the contrary — refused to say which way she would vote. Now, that’s leadership!

Fianna Fáil used to do the nastiest heaves in town, but this kindergarten coup was not a patch on the Blueshirt bloodbath of the summer. The closest we got to fireworks was when Mary O’Rourke sneeringly branded Ms Hanafin a “prim aunt” — catty, but hardly cutting.

Martin remained all over the place for the duration of his attempted putsch. He claimed the IMF bail-out humiliation was a “watershed” moment in his decision to stand against Cowen. So why didn’t he do so when it happened in November then, rather than traipse sheepishly behind the Taoiseach as he announced the disaster in Government Buildings?

But, of course the IMF takeover was not a disaster at all, according to the Taoiseach, that is just a “lazy media narrative”.

Indeed, the Taoiseach was throwing the insult “lazy” around a lot yesterday — a dangerous move for a man better known for his gruelling nights in hotel bars, than for his long days in the office.

But, to the delight of FF TDs, Mr Cowen had rebranded himself as a “fighter” — and if this amounted to trying to gruffly bully Áine Lawlor on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, then they must have been very pleased.

Outside the FF bubble, the Real World was worried about little things like mass unemployment and mortgage repossession.

But the Minister for Connivance, sorry Finance, was typically tripping over himself on economics, suddenly suggesting we could renegotiate the appalling levels of interest on the EU/IMF bail-out loans he and Cowen had saddled us with — after rubbishing the opposition for urging the same. Though delusional Lenny refuses to call it a bailout, insisting it’s just a “facility” — he’d like to go a step further into fantasy and brand it “the IMF’s magic pixie dust” but realises even FF backbenchers aren’t gullible enough to go for that one. The bailout did cause SF’s Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin to note Cowen’s self-styled “fighter” tag and wonder why the Taoiseach had not “fought” harder for Ireland against the IMF. What did Mr Ó Caoláin have in mind for the “fight”? An update of SF’s most notorious campaign slogan — “A Poor Box In One Hand And An Armalite In The Other”?

Though, on reflection, that would have made more sense than this heave which has left us with Martin, Lenihan and Cowen exposed as a ditherer and two slitherers.