Labour loses Willie but with so many balls in the air he’ll hardly notice
The Tánaiste was thrown into travails by the petulant posturing of Willie Penrose who became the Cabinet’s first self-inflicted casualty, going AWOL after the barracks in his constituency was earmarked for closure.
Given Europe is on the brink of financial melt- down and we are about to face a €3.8 billion ram-raid horror budget, Penrose’s tipping point might seem a tad trivial.
But then the Tánaiste has nobody to blame but himself for over- promoting Penrose when much better qualified people were available for a housing minister role that should have been front and centre of Labour’s thinking amid the mortgage misery, but was allowed to fester under the member for Mullingar’s military wing.
Being a “super-junior”, Mr Penrose sat at the Cabinet table but was not allowed to vote and, indeed, not allowed to say anything unless asked to.
Which begs the question, given his penchant for amateur dramatics, how did Penrose convey his intentions to quit at yesterday’s meeting?
Hopefully, by summoning his best mime artist attributes, putting on a sad clown face, looking tearfully at the door, letting his fingers do the walking across the Cabinet table.
But suddenly Gilmore was fighting a war on two fronts, with Willie waving fury in his face at Leinster House, while MEP Nessa Childers accused a senior Labour politician of leaving a threatening message on her mobile to saying she had better keep quiet about her opposition to Kevin Cardiff being parachuted into a prime Brussels post.
Eamon denied he was behind the mafiosi- sounding Dial M for Menace plot, but the fact Ms Childers’s phone has now been stolen and the alleged tape of the Labour top gun, threatening to blow the MEP out of the party could now be in the hands of the Brussels underworld, merely added to the air of intrigue.
All of which was good news for Sinn Féin, which lost no time laying into Labour as it unveiled its own fantasy budget.
Indeed, just to show atonement for previous flashness, even the customary plate of biscuits wheeled out at such events had been decommissioned and put beyond use.
When a fretting broadcast hack advised Gerry Adams to “mind the wires” as he headed to the microphones, one wag mumbled “at least they’re not trip wires”.
Adams remained sure-footed as it was left to Mr Gilmore to flail all over the place as he faced rebellion at home and abroad.
Margaret Thatcher once famously said of her then deputy William Whitelaw that “every prime minister needs a Willie”, but our own dear Tánaiste must now do without his — but in a few days he will probably not remember that he ever had one.
This Government can hardly complain about losing a Willie, when it has already been castrated politically by the troika.
