Red Baron knows he must huff and puff

ANGER appeared to be the only energy Eamon Gilmore needed to fuel his campaign convoy’s sweep through the West Midlands.

By the time he got to Longford the Labour leader looked ready to combust — the Red Baron of Rage was back.

And it was not hard to see why — the posters may still be saying “Gilmore For Taoiseach,” but the opinion polls are saying “Gilmore For Leader Of The Opposition”.

The presidential-style campaign had misfired and badly needed re-calibration as Fine Gael moved to a yawning 20-point lead.

As Enda Kenny’s head was turned with increasing thoughts of one-party government, Labour behaved like a spurned lover and demanded attention through a series of attack ads.

The “Every Little Hurts” campaign is the most effective attempt to go negative since, ironically, Fianna Fáil’s brilliantly timed, brilliantly misleading, onslaught on the Rainbow parties tax plans which swung the 2007 election back to Bertie Ahern in its dying days.

Labour is looking down the barrel of its fourth straight election defeat and is determined not to be blown away without a fight.

Mr Gilmore and the other senior socialists know that with their Dáil party’s average age well into the 60s, this is almost certainly their generation’s last chance to achieve power.

While it is still unlikely Fine Gael will get an overall majority, or rule with a band of independents, the closer Mr Kenny gets to the magic 83 TDs needed to control the Dáil, the stronger whip hand he wields on a coalition with Labour — which is why Mr Gilmore has turned all fire on his would-be partner in government.

Mr Gilmore denies resorting to scare tactics or promoting the politics of fear over hope as Labour’s campaign target’s Fine Gael’s agenda of “stealth taxes” and public sector cuts. He insists a hard-right turn under a Fine Gael government will condemn the nation to a decade of stagnation.

“If Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael policies continue to be implemented in this country — then, yes, families are going to be screwed, and I make no apology to anyone for stating it in the bluntest possible terms,” he said.

Not that Fine Gael is taking any of this lying down, as Michael Noonan led a fierce counter-attack in which he appeared particularly non-plussed by Labour’s warning that Enda’s “toxic Tories” would slap an extra euro on a bottle of wine.

So, that’s what the programme for government negotiations will descend to — both parties reduced to the equivalent of two winos in an alley squabbling over the last quid for a bottle of chardonnay?

These are dangerous final days for a Labour campaign which mistakenly pushed its presidential-style politics of personality above the policy-driven narrative voters wanted to hear.

And the stronger Fine Gael electoral strength becomes, the harder it will be for Mr Kenny to grant Labour what it considers its coalition right, the Department of Finance — and without control of the Department of Finance, Labour knows there is very little tangible point in going into government anyway.

But then the economic war between the two parties is so vicious because they should never be contemplating going into partnership together in the first place — but Ireland’s traditional dysfunction within the Western European political model which needs a progressive Tory party and a socialist-tinged social democratic set-up to join forces in order to oust the (once) populist Fianna Fáil from office, dictates it.

However, the demise of Fianna Fáil to the status of an also-ran party offers some chance that left/right politics may finally be being born in Ireland some 88 years after the Civil War guns fell silent.

Mullingar was only down the road from where Mr Gilmore was raging, but that town’s famous accord between Labour and Fine Gael has now been replaced by the Longford Lash.

The Labour leader knows he has to huff and puff or else the fabled Gilmore Gale risks blowing itself out.