Bertie changes tune as Callely joins Lowry on home affairs casualty list

IN selecting his generals Napoleon Bonaparte was more concerned that they were lucky than that they were talented. In recent days it is beginning to appear like Bertie Ahern may be running out of luck.

Indeed, his Government is beginning to take on some of the GUBU aspects that haunted Charlie Haughey's governments in the early 1980s.

In February 1981, as the Short Fellow was building up towards his first general election as Taoiseach, the Fianna Fáil árd fheis was designed to give him and the party a boost, but it was destroyed by our version of the St Valentine's Day massacre the Stardust fire in which 48 young people lost their lives in a nightclub in the Artane area of Dublin.