LABOUR CONFERENCE: Like dance of the macabre as listless liner drifts to disaster
The passengers and crew on the good ship Labour all know where this journey will end, smashed ashore on rocks of reality as the water takes them under — Irish Water to be precise.
But the assurance of their sealed political fate seemed to gel into a strangely upbeat mood as if they collectively decided to go down fighting.
Unable to change course this far into the voyage, party members decided to stop apologising and instead trumpet the achievements they have made in government.
Indeed, Environment Minister and deputy leader Alan Kelly had a trumpet all of his own and hardly stopped blowing it from one end of the conference to the other.
Nearly everybody seemed to love Alan Kelly, but, of course, not nearly as much as Alan Kelly seemed to love himself.
Why, even Mr Kelly’s own constituency put down a motion saying how great Mr Kelly is, just in case anybody had not got the message.
At one point, Mr Kelly sharply reminded the chairwoman of the conference he was the deputy leader, not her, when she tried to close him down, which was as subtle as when he reminded Joan Burton that he wanted her job last week.
But what will there be left to lead after the general election?
Michael Noonan predicted that, on a very bad day Labour could lose 18 seats, taking its tally down to 19.
For a finance minister, Mr Noonan’s grasp of figures is worrying, as his bad-day scenario would be the best day that Labourites could hope for, as they expect their TD haul to slump to single figures.
Things started off well as the first night of conference proved there was still a flickering pulse of democracy in the party, with delegates voting against the leadership and demanding the reversal of cuts to the dole for jobseekers under 25.
However, the status quo was firmly restored the following morning when motions on rent controls and ensuring against the privatisation of Irish Water in the Constitution were withdrawn on the urging of top brass.
The only other drama of the weekend was when anti-water charge demonstrators descended on the conference venue in a mainly good-natured protest which saw a bit of banging on the hotel restaurant windows as the Labourites lunched inside.
It was a perfect “let them eat cake” — or perhaps “let them drink water” — metaphor for the disconnect between the two, as the raging political sore of the moment got barely a mention inside the conference hall.
Mystery people have a strange habit of appearing in political speeches with the regularity of corpses in Murder She Wrote.
And so, in the emotional high point of the weekend, Joan Burton introduced us to the person known only as the “woman in a yellow coat” who approached her about the marriage equality referendum at the Obama Plaza in Moneygall.
Ms Burton had expected a rough ride from the woman (do No voters have a tendency to wear yellow?), but instead the pair ended up hugging as the woman wanted equality for her gay son.
“Tears welled up as I realised we’re fighting for more than just two people in a loving relationship. We’re fighting for everybody who loves them in turn,” Ms Burton trilled as the image of Joan as mother to the nation was distilled throughout the hall
A handy short film had helped set the scene for subtle changes to brand Joan, who had clearly been told to tone down her conference delivery.
We were informed that a porter at UCD advised her to switch from English to business studies on her first day — an experience she surely put to good use last May when she told Eamon Gilmore he had no choice but to switch from leader to backbencher. But that was then, this is now, and the inevitable electoral wreckage is yet to come.
For what was probably its last hurrah before that fateful day, delegates decided to put the party back into Labour and danced on the Titanic long into the night.
LABOUR CONFERENCE: Party ‘must govern with the head and the heart’
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