Sheepish grins as Fine Gael candidates skip shearing

In Russia, senior politicians demonstrate their virility by horse-riding bare-chested, shooting tigers, and annexing chunks of neighbouring states.

In Italy they amass billions in personal wealth and protect it with armies of young maidens in bikinis. In North Korea they use not particularly useful relatives for target practice.

Here, they shear sheep. Or at least they threaten to. For in what might possibly take the all-time speed record for the breaking of an election promise, three government ministers and their Euro candidate were supposed to relieve woolly creatures of their winter coats at the World Sheep Shearing Championships in Gorey but the much anticipated spectacle never materialised.

“Health and safety reasons,” was the explanation provided although it was not clarified whether the concern was for the wellbeing of the sheep or the ministers.

The worry should be for the health and safety of the bright spark who came up with the idea in the first place for it might not have been the wisest step to take three ministers from a party pilloried for taking the last forensic fibre of shirt fabric from the back of the taxpayer and have them photographed stripping a sheep.

Headlines like “Fleeced!” would have been inevitable above images of Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney, Tourism Minister Leo Varadkar, and Chief Whip Paul Kehoe wrestling an indignant ewe in a melee of flailing hooves and egos.

Euro candidate Simon Harris would have been accused of sheep worrying, forever more known as “sheep harrissing”, or called a “lamb to the slaughter”.

Wags would have remarked how Varadkar, so often the black sheep of the Fine Gael pen, seemed happy to adopt the herd mentality on the occasion, and all would have been described as emerging from the encounter looking “sheepish”.

Of course, none of this happened because all the fearsome foursome did in the sheep department was pose with one for the cameras.

And then it was off to grapple with a far more troublesome beast. If a giraffe is an animal designed by committee then the South constituency is an animal designed by a committee chaired by a giraffe — the addition of five Leinster counties turning it into a sprawling two-headed creature looking east and west at the same time and threatening to devour hopes and ambitions all over.

“It’s difficult,” Simon Coveney conceded before launching into a defence of the party’s electoral strategy.

For a brief moment it looked like the fabulous four’s flying visit to the event might live up to the dizzying heights promised when Simon and Leo were convinced to take a crossbow in their manly grips.

But the weapons were handed back without injury. No incidents, no exclamations, no headlines, no puns. No need to count sheep to get to sleep.

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