We’re just warming up for five years of fear and loathing

A REVOLUTIONARY new blood test can tell you when you’re going to die — but the bad blood now starting to surge between Labour and Fine Gael tells its own story of premature ill health.

The €500 test which calculates a person’s biological age, as opposed to their numeric one, offers medics the intriguing chance of being able to predict how long someone has left to live with a reasonable level of accuracy.

The deeply controversial test measures vital structures on the tips of a person’s chromosomes, known as telomeres, which scientists believe are the most accurate indicators of the speed at which someone is ageing.

The procedure is expected to become widespread over the next five years, thus triggering massive implications for the insurance industry and other, wider, moral dilemmas which could end in tears.

But, then Enda Kenny is already crying, but strangely it’s at the thought of Riverdance, not in frustration at the silly own goals his Government is becoming adept at.

“I actually cry every time I see the power of the phenomenon of Riverdance — ancient dance translated into a phenomenal and powerful message,” he told bemused-looking ambassadors at a gathering of Ireland’s diplomatic elite.

(Seriously, who writes his speeches? And more importantly, why are they still in a job?)

Big Phil Hogan was also left turning on the waterworks as Mr Kenny again hung yet another of his ministers out to dry — with Labour raging from the sidelines — when Fine Gael turned the household tax/tap charges announcement into a full-on Laurel and Hardyproduction.

And then there was Leo, and he is nothing if not logical. It seems Mr Varadkar was just expanding upon his Vulcanesque technique of non-emotional, fact-based thinking and stating the bleeding obvious when he threw his improvised incendiary device about Ireland needing another emergency bailout into the body politic.

But nothing rocks an Irish Government like talk of a bailout.

Indeed a bailout is a bit like the political equivalent of Fight Club in so much as the first rule of it is that you must never, ever, mention it.

Leo’s loose talk triggered a tsunami of denials from fellow ministers with Mr Kenny again insisting, in an almost “read my lips...no new bailout” kind of way, that such a thing was unthinkable next year.

So, of course, all the smart money then immediately pencilled in a new bailout for next year.

And poor little Richard Bruton didn’t need the click of the Riverdance heels to feel his eyes welling up as he was getting it from both ends when he rather hastily announced “reforms” to the joint labour pay agreements that put a wage floor under many vulnerable workers in industries such as construction and hospitality — r-e-f-o-r-m, of course, being the way right-wingers spell the word known to the rest of us as c-u-t-s.

In the first flash of public post-heave anger we’ve seen, Enda made very pointed remarks about Bruton’s “personal agenda”, before ludicrously trying to convince us he hadn’t said that the next day.

But the wrath of Labour was mightier, with the party’s press office being cranked-up to spew-out very aggressive, and quite personalised, attacks on Bruton’s ideas.

This all gave a rare moment of relevance to Fianna Fáil who have existed as an “opposition” in name only since their shattering crash at the general election.

Micheál Martin — who has clearly never heard of the word “shameless” — piously warned that: “loose talk costs jobs.”

And what better expert could there be on the subject apart from a senior member of the last government that at the peak of its incompetence and incoherence was losing some 2,000 jobs a week for this country?

Though Fianna Fáil remain dazed and confused politically, there is little sign that their political fortunes will recover.

Indeed, it would be a brave FF-er who suggested the party took a collective Telomere blood test to see exactly how long it had left to go.

The party is a prisoner of its past and even when the FG/Labour coalition sinks into inevitable unpopularity, FF is in no position to gain from the backlash as it keeps trumpeting the fact that the new Government has stolen its ideas on the banks, economy etc, so will be damned once again by an angry electorate.

That situation should leave all the energy with Sinn Féin and their light-touch package of pocket-book populism, but Gerry Adams has made a spectacularly bad transfer to the Dáil and seems shrunken and bewildered by the stage offered to him, rather than able to command it.

It would be far better for the party if he took the back-seat he enjoyed at Stormont and left the front of house stuff to the likes of thrusting young buck Pearse Doherty.

But it looks more likely that a worrying vacuum will now emerge in Irish politics that will inevitably be filled by more aggressive ideologies if the present party system is viewed as an endless repetition of more of the same.

But then what does actually make sense in Irish politics? Certainly not the idea of a Tory party and a Labour party being in government together, yet that is what we have got.

And if Labour and Fine Gael are unable to get their act together on annoying, yet relatively minor decisions, like water charges and limited pay changes, how the hell will they cope when the Comprehensive Spending Review comes thundering down the line in the autumn triggering deep social welfare cuts and the break-up of the Croke Park deal?

The blood pressure in the coalition will surely be sky high by then, and though Labourites will probably feel like the biological age of the administration will be all but at termination stage, they know neither party will want to risk a snap general election amid that level of economic acrimony, and thus be stuck together.

So, the rather rickety roller-coaster events of the past week could be the warm-up for five years of fear and loathing in Government Buildings.

Now, that really would be something worth crying over, Enda.