Kenny bets on Clive but won’t joust with Vincent
She was, of course, talking about Clive, a shaggy guide dog for autistic children who was on his hind legs and doing a kind of tango around a betting shop with the would-be Taoiseach.
A charity bet in a bookies in the shadow of the Dáil has become a staple of Irish elections, and it was on the very same spot that Bertie Ahern made a similar wager in 2007 — though Bertie’s reputation soon went to the dogs after he trotted out wins on the horses to try and explain all those unusual cash lodgements into his bank accounts at the Mahon corruption probe.
Mr Kenny’s gamble will see Irish Guide Dogs profit by €4,000 if Fine Gael gets more than 70 seats — and it looks like Clive will end up the winner as the Blueshirts establish a commanding opinion poll lead despite lingering doubts in the public’s mind about their leader, while Fianna Fáil continues to stutter in third place as Micheál Martin’s personal popularity fails to make an impact on his party.
Mr Martin is a bit like a cheap seaside illusionist, making a virtue of necessity while trying unsuccessfully to hypnotise the nation into losing its collective memory that he was at the cabinet table when all the ‘mistakes’ he apologises for were made.
The Fianna Fáil leader said he took the unusual step of appointing councillors and a candidate to his front bench because it represented “new politics”. It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that the talent locker in his exhausted party is well and truly empty then?
Mr Martin insisted he had no time for sound bites, before deploying one and branding any FG and Labour administration a “tug-of-war government”, again asking us to conveniently forget that his party had got into bed with the socialists and Greens when it suited them, despite having very little in common.
Pat Rabbitte tried to paint Mr Martin as some kind of latter-day Benny Hill, running up and down Grafton Street desperately seeking attractive women to put into his top team — but it was the Labourite who ended up apologising for sexism.
Eamon Gilmore didn’t seem to take the offence caused by Mr Rabbitte too seriously, but made sure his campaign launch in the Guinness Store House’s Gravity Bar was dripping with women candidates. Indeed, Mr Gilmore would barely move around the bar without making sure he was surrounded by females, to the extent he looked like a sort of socialist Austin Powers: “Yeah, baby, anti-poverty-tastic!”
But that would be far too interesting for the most tightly controlled of all the party leaders, whose journey from hard left to boring Blairite was completed when he dropped his levy increases for high-income earners as soon as he started getting branded a tax-fanatic by — of all people — Mr Martin’s FF.
But the party machines were really just cranking into higher gear for the beginning of real battle next week when manifestos are launched and TV debates staged.
And at least the debate about the debate has decided one thing — that Vincent Browne will not host the TV3 one, well not if they want Enda to turn up anyway.
It was not necessary for Mr Kenny to use some silly comment Browne made about him going into a room with a stiff drink and a revolver during the Blueshirt coup attempt last summer as an excuse to refuse to take part.
All he had to say was: “Vincent Browne? TV debate? You must be joking.” The result would be incredibly entertaining but could the shredded reputation of Irish politics really survive such a circus with Vinegar Vincent the mad professor-style ringmaster?
And talking of clowns, what a moment for Ivor Callely to strut out of the High Court with €17,000 of taxpayers’ cash burning a hole in his back pocket as compensation for being suspended from the Seanad for 20 days after his peers ruled he had wrongly claimed up to €81,000 in travel expenses from his west Cork holiday home. That was really not the backdrop Mr Martin wanted for his attempted whitewash of Fianna Fáil’s past disasters.
But at least he finally bundled Brian Cowen off the stage.
It was a rather shabby end to his tenure as Taoiseach. Close to tears in a local radio station corridor, Mr Cowen announced he would not be standing for election again. But he still appears to be blaming a supposed media witch-hunt for his demise, rather than his own often appalling political judgment.
He cut a much more dignified figure the next day when he dissolved the 30th Dáil and bade farewell to the chamber for good after 27 years as a deputy.
And then there was Willie. Just to prove nothing is ever really over in politics, Mr Martin resurrected the career of Mr O’Dea despite the facts that he peddled untruths to a journalist about a Sinn Féin rival’s involvement with an alleged brothel, denied he had done so until a tape of the conversation appeared and then admitted a sworn affidavit he had given to the High Court on the incident was untrue.
Mr O’Dea’s appallingly arrogant behaviour in the no-confidence vote the controversy triggered — during which he suddenly claimed a garda had given him the original untrue smear information — finally did for him and he was forced to resign as defence minister. And this is the face of the new-look Fianna Fáil?
Little Willie the poster boy of the new politics, eh Micheál?
Even Clive would turn down a stroke like that.
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