We have started the countdown to Zimbabwe

MY abiding memory of the reportage of the Fianna Fáil árd fheis will be of the 9pm RTÉ News on Saturday (February 28). There was an acutely embarrassed David Davin-Power boxed in, jostled, squeezed and almost smothered by a family-photo array of FF local election candidates. Elderly, suited, male — and very much past it. All leering at the camera. The reassembled cast of the iconic horror movie Night of the Living Dead.

In one short week Mary Coughlan tells us the public finances are totally under control; Martin Cullen takes an e8,000 helicopter trip for a photo-opportunity in Killarney; Willie O’Dea cannot keep the door from falling off the same helicopter; Noel Dempsey tells us the Government will spend the next three weeks far from the madding crowd drafting the “not a mini-budget” draconian whammy which they should have hit us with on October 14 last (Will they, the heroes of the Celtic Tiger, be doing this in Ulick McEvaddy’s villa on the Riviera?).

Are these people genuine extra-terrestrial aliens from a planet far beyond our solar system? Or just second-rate actors from a flopped and forgotten science fiction television series?