Ministerial career threatens to go down the drain
An air of unending fiasco is gathering around Feck-It-Up Phil, not helped by his increasingly desperate attempts to pretend there is not a problem, such as when he boasted he had “won a few quid” in bets because an “overwhelming majority” had paid the household tax he introduced in a manner reminiscent of the golden era of slapstick comedy.
But the reality is that “Hogan: We Have A Problem” when only 56% of people comply with the law and pay the flat-rate charge.
Swaggering from the disaster of the household tax to the almighty mess of water metering, maybe Feck-It-Up Phil is not incompetent, but just unlucky — but then that would make him one of the unluckiest men since Japanese pensioner Tsutomu Yamaguchi who died two years ago at the age of 94 after winning notoriety for his habit of walking into atomic bombs.
Mr Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945, when a US B-29 bomber dropped its payload on the city. He suffered serious burns but was allowed to go home to his family. Unfortunately for Mr Yamaguchi, his home was in Nagasaki and he got there three days later — just in time for a second atomic bomb.
It sounds like the level of extraordinary calamity that could easily befall Feck-It-Up Phil as he seemingly lurches from one doom-laden disaster to another.
Throw into the mix his ill-judged decision to meet with Michael Lowry days after the disgraced deputy was found to have indulged in “corrupt acts” by the Moriarty Tribunal, and his embarrassing climbdown on turf-cutting charges, not to mention the unfortunate revelation he was withholding paying service charges on a Portuguese holiday home on the very day half the country ignored his deadline to pay the household tax, and you have a one-man political circus on your hands.
Feck-It-Up Phil had fled to an EU meeting in Denmark, so it was left to embattled Enda to try and calm the raging waters in the Dáil, but to little effect. Captain Kenny quite rightly pointed out that all this unpleasantness over meters and household tax was the legacy of the Fianna Fáil-Green administration, but he holed himself below the water line when he tried to insist Fianna Fáil had performed a giant “scam” on the Irish people by pretending services could be paid for by a never ending property boom — which is true.
If Enda needs further proof of that he just has to flick through the Fine Gael 2007 election manifesto which gleefully peddled the same fantasy. At least Cack-handed Hogan cannot be blamed for that one, and to be fair to him, he was just one of the three stooges regarding the weekend meter melee as the Taoiseach and Tánaiste also gushed confusion in the manner of a burst water main.
But the key factor is that Enda knows he needs the likeable, but burly bruiser to watch his back in the potentially heave-heavy run-up to the next election, which means that Feck-It-Up Phil is far from fecked yet.
