It looks set to be the last Christmas for Enda Kenny and Joan Burton in coalition
FAGS, booze and a feeling of dread have dominated the last, agitated, Christmas Enda Kenny and Joan Burton are likely to spend together.
The European superstate took the choice out of their hands regarding cigarettes and alcohol, but it was the last significant decision that Mr Kenny will take on his own — the election date — that added to the usual Yuletide strains on the relationship.
Europe backed one of the few daring, agenda-setting, and majorly beneficial policies the Coalition government brought in, banning fag companies pushing their cancer causing poison at, mainly, teenage girls with garish packaging in order to give them a lifetime addiction — however short, but financially lucrative, their lives might be for the tobacco industry as it feeds them terminal diseases.
There was less cheer for ministers on the booze front as minimum pricing was frowned on in favour of a health conscious taxation strategy.
But tax is the last thing Mr Kenny wants on voters minds in the weeks running up to the election, so expect high-minded principles on low-cost selling to be one of the first casualties of the campaign.
Any prime minister only has two major powers, timing and patronage, and Mr Kenny is about to roll the dice for the last time to gamble on both.
After Ms Burton plugged herself into the national grid last autumn to generate all the public sound and fury it took on her part to stop Enda flirting with a November election, Mr Kenny’s only real option is to go to the country in February — and then just go, as he was forced into announcing this would be his last Dáil poll as party leader.
Given the poverty of political choice in this country, it would be a major upset if Enda did not lead the next administration — however shaky and short-lived it might be.
Then he gets to choose the Fine Gael slice of the Cabinet for the last time and wait for one of those chosen, probably Leo Varadkar, or Simon Coveney, to push him into a shallow political grave as early as is decently possible.
But, it being Christmas and always wanting to please the crowds, Enda has delivered us a pantomime in the saga of his cack-handed attempts to deselect former minister John Perry in Sligo.
Fine Gael director of elections Brian Hayes said the whole unseemly mess was sorted out with a “pow wow”.
Strange then that Mr Hayes did not think of channelling his inner Native American before the unpleasant political spat spent five days in the High Court at a reported cost of up to €500,000.
Also curious that Fine Gael, who are usually so keen to tell us how they have been spending our money so wisely on schools and transport in the run-up to the election, are so coy about saying how much they wasted in court trying to keep Perry off the ticket.
Fine Gael gets a nice little hand-out of €3m a year from the hard-pressed taxpayer, so it would be nice if they came clean on how they spent such precious resources, which could go a way to restoring some of the special needs assistants they have axed in the past five years. But Fine Gael insist they need the money so they do not have to do anything grubby like hawk themselves around scrounging for cash from donors.
Again, this is intriguing, because Mr Kenny was doing exactly that at a matter of weeks ago at a hotel in north London. Mr Kenny doesn’t really want you to know about that, and he and other FG big guns were most annoyed to find the press had been alerted to the little fundraiser intended to tap some €25,000 out of London Irish donors.
Despite being an austerity junkie, there were no cuts in sight at the hotel in Cricklewood. It was all give, give, give as Enda begged for money from the assembled guests who paid £100 (€136) a head for the pleasure of being in his company, why, Mr Kenny even provided the envelopes to elicit more generosity.
The menu contained a signed statement by the Taoiseach in which he told diners Ireland had a clear choice between “economic progress or chaos.”
And the money-orientated nature of the event was not allowed to leave diners minds as the menu’s back cover reminded guests to enter the raffle and “simply place your donation in the envelope provided”.
This took place in the same week Fine Gael went berserk about Gerry Adams attending a fundraiser in the US. And while the Fine Gael dinner and donate date pales in comparison to the way Adams and his ever uncritical sidekick political parrot Mary Lou McDonald have prostrated themselves this week before convicted tax evader Thomas “Slab” Murphy, it does suggest a degree of double standards.
Ms Burton may not have Enda’s cash to fall back on as she nervously awaits her party’s reckoning with an electorate disproportionately angry at Labour, but at least Joan has been seasonally blessed in other ways.
Mr Varadkar may be about to cook her goose in the Dublin West constituency they share, and which can only realistically return one Coalition TD next time out, but Joan has the luxury of a self-stuffing turkey on hand as over-ambitious deputy leader Alan Kelly royally stuffed-up his chances of ousting her when he was accused of leaking unhelpful polling data.
But, whatever about the fags, booze and turkeys, this could well be Enda and Joan’s last Christmas as leaders as they know their close political colleagues will have the carving knives out for them well before the nation sits down for dinner this time next year.
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