Bertie is getting more irritable as Rainbow starts coming into view

BEFORE any big prize fight, there’s always hype. Champion and challenger square up to each other at the weigh-in, glowering and trying to look as menacing as possible.

Sometimes things get out of hand. The champion, if he’s feeling a bit threatened, demands that they fight it out here and now. The seconds shout at each other, and the two managers each give press conferences at which the sole purpose is to disparage the other guy.

You get it a lot these days in English football, too. Time was when managers treated each other with respect, and behaved themselves as if the dignity of the game mattered.

Nowadays, hardly a week goes by without Arsene Wenger threatening to sue Jose Mourinho, or acres of newsprint being used to speculate about the dissent in the dressing rooms at Old Trafford.

Personality spats between the players are presented as being more important than what happens on the pitch.

We’re in that stage in politics now. The shadow boxing is the precursor of the real thing, and it’s a sure sign that a general election is not nearly as far away as we think it is.

There are some differences, of course. For a start, neither Enda Kenny nor Bertie Ahern is very good at glowering. Both men find it difficult to convey a real sense of menace. The best Enda can manage is a bit of verbal abuse, although he usually prefaces that by saying “I like the other guy personally, but ...”

With Bertie, the more typical approach is to look irritated. And that’s an increasing look nowadays. When our Taoiseach was on the rise, he never looked anything but patient and understanding. It’s a sign that things are getting to him that he increasingly looks as if someone in his vicinity has made a bad smell.

But the attempts to upstage are a good sign that real battle is being joined. It was an unspoken tradition in Irish politics for years that if one of the bigger parties had a major event on, the others tended to give them their weekend. You wouldn’t find major statements coming from the Government on the weekend of a substantial opposition conference, and vice versa. Lately each side seems to work harder at trying to drown out the voice of the other. I’m sure Fianna Fáil would say that it was the parties of the Rainbow that started this tactic. Twelve months ago Fine Gael and Labour upstaged the famous Inchydoney meeting by going to Belvedere House in Mullingar and announcing the so-called Mullingar Accord to great fanfare. Twelve months later they did it again by celebrating the anniversary of the accord, and announcing a new approach to social partnership, at exactly the same time as Fianna Fáil was having its Cavan think-in. To make matters worse, the Fianna Fáil ministers had all arrived in Cavan armed with scripts deriding the Rainbow parties for having no policies, and were all a bit flummoxed by having to deal with the social partnership announcement made in Mullingar.

That probably accounts for the timing of the announcement by the Taoiseach that he would have no truck with Sinn Féin in the formation of the next Government, and by the series of PD speeches at the weekend, in the guise of a 20th anniversary celebration of the founding of their party. And of course the spurious row between Bertie and Liz O’Donnell about the role of the Catholic Church helped to generate some publicity as well. The row was spurious because no amount of verbiage is going to change that particular power relationship as long as either of the two larger parties have anything to do with it.

Still, they partly succeeded in taking some of the coverage away from Fine Gael’s conference in Millstreet. They couldn’t, however, obscure the fact that Fine Gael, and Enda Kenny, in particular, had a good one. They’re rapidly beginning to look like a party ready for government, and the close alliance between Enda and Pat Rabbitte looks like it can make a real electoral difference.

And that’s me being as objective as possible about it. I know I have a partisan view on the matter, but it’s hard to escape what you’re told everywhere you go that people really are looking for a change.

One thing that has surprised me a bit in some of the commentary has been the emphasis on the need to get more frontbenchers looking like alternative cabinet ministers. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but no-one ever looks like a minister until they become one. And then they either grow or shrink in office.

IF you doubt that, think back to the time when Bertie Ahern was leader of the Opposition. Columnist after columnist then wrote that he simply didn’t look like a man who had the right stuff. There were jibes about the rat in the anorak, about his way of mangling the English language, about how little he seemed to know about the world outside Fianna Fáil. And he went on to become a Taoiseach that some of the same commentators routinely describe as unbeatable.

The same is true of Enda Kenny. We simply don’t know how good he will be until he gets the job, but we do know that you can’t judge a government leader from his opposition track record. The day Albert Reynolds was elected Taoiseach, no-one in the wide earthly world would have predicted that (a) he would make Northern Ireland his top priority, and (b) he would succeed in breaking through a 30-year impasse. (Of course, they weren’t the only things people failed to predict about Albert).

And if it’s true of the leader of an opposition party that you can’t predict how good or bad they’ll be in office, it’s equally true of the front bench. But I will tell you this... if you look at the list of people who might well be in the running to join an alternative cabinet, and especially if you compare them to the current team, they already look a pretty formidable bunch.

Eamonn Gilmore v Dick Roche? Olwyn Enright v Mary Hanafin? Pat Rabbitte v Brian Cowen? Brendan Howlin v Michael Martin? Liz McManus v Mary Harney? Richard Bruton v Martin Cullen? Phil Hogan v Noel Dempsey? John Gormley v Willie O’Dea?

You can develop your own list, and I’m betting you wouldn’t be staking too much money on any of the incumbents in contests like these.

The key questions yet to be answered are these. What difference will a Rainbow make to our lives? Is there a risk in voting for the alternative? Will they mess with a successful economy? Can they be trusted with management? What are their real priorities? Don’t expect answers to those questions any time soon.

The opposition parties know full well that the Government and the media will start discounting everything they say the minute they say it. If an alternative government was to spell out a detailed programme (say) a year out from the election, that programme would be utterly undermined by a negative campaign well before the election bell went.

In politics, just as in boxing, timing is everything.