Gilmore and Labour paying a high price for being in government

YOU might forgive Eamon Gilmore if he didn’t want to fly home from New York.

What a difference for the Tanáiste between swanning around at the United Nations, being treated as some kind of Very Important Person, and coming home to Dublin, where being leader of the Labour party is an ever-increasing trial of patience and will and where a host of problems, many self-inflicted, may be incapable of satisfactory resolution.

Roisin Shortall really hit him hard on Wednesday, not just by her resignation as a junior minister, but from the Labour parliamentary party and by her method of doing it: apparently resigning by email when he was out of the country showed a degree of contempt for her party leader and undermined him greatly.