Atop a grassy knoll, Gilmore hits nothing but his foot

FEAR and loathing continues to dominate Fine Gael and Labour’s pre-budget bust-ups.

It was fitting that on the anniversary of the assignation of JFK, conspiracy theories rebounded around the Dáil as to why Labour, in particular, had lost so much control of the message.

Instead of a grassy knoll, Eamon Gilmore was painted as being trapped in a self-dug hole — a lone gunman shooting himself in the foot after his election pledge to protect child benefit at all costs.

One prominent Labour deputy predicted today’s parliamentary party meeting would be a production worthy of boxing promoter Don King. But such political showdowns rarely live up to their pre-fight hype.

Yesterday, the self-styled People’s Party descended into the Paranoid Party as some Labourites (and a few Fine Gaelers) mused on whether Joan Burton had set the whole child benefit brouhaha up to make Gilmore look bad in the hope of a leadership takeover in 18 months when the party is expected to be deeply unpopular.

This theory rests on the idea that St Joan still burns with rage on the stake of sexism that supporters accuse Gilmore of spiking her with via his mangled ministerial appointments in March when she was demoted to Social Protection — a position some contend was intended to pierce her popularity and leave her wounded as the cut-laden Wicked Witch of Welfare.

But Burton has battled to protect her battered budget and taken the fight to Fine Gael by demanding firms pay the first four weeks of sick pay instead of the state, which Enda’s tetchy Tories are up in arms about. But it is, realistically speaking, a modest reform compared to what happens in Britain and parts of the continent.

However, it is no wonder voters feel cheated after bondholders remain unburned and child benefit trembles unprotected despite campaign pledges to the contrary.

In truth, each Coalition partner lied to the electorate out of fear of the other one.

Fine Gael made promises it knew it could not keep because it desperately wanted an overall majority and Labour did the same in an equally desperate bid to stop Kenny governing alone.

It is no coincidence that it was in the final panic-stricken days of the hustings, when Labour’s badly misjudged campaign looked like leaving them in opposition yet again, that suddenly, students were promised a fee-free future and the unequivocal pledge went out that only gallant Gilmore could stop the Blueshirts bashing child benefit.

The election result left Kenny just a handful of seats shy of one-party rule — and you can bet your IMF-borrowed dollar that if they had secured a majority no one would now be shouting louder than the Labour leader that even threatening to cut child benefit for the poorest families in the country was a cruelty too far.

Whatever the real scale of the threat to child benefit, there is genuine anger on the Labour benches over how the leadership botched the situation to such an extent that if come budget day they try to claim to have lessened the cut to struggling families, the cut to the party’s credibility will still be deep.