Lucinda’s got the limelight, but can she enlighten us on policies?

Is it just a case of Lucy In The Sky With Diatribes, or can Ms Creighton really deliver the well-deserved boot Irish politics needs?

Like her new party’s name, the answer to that conundrum remains unknown, but the rebel ex-minister of state has put a bit of flesh on the bones of the emaciated-looking political specimen she unveiled to an anxious nation last Friday.

Ever the canny mistress of media spin, that event was just the warm-up act before going fully live at the end of February. The Dublin South East TD seized the political initiative as her erstwhile allies in Fine Gael were still dealing with their New Year’s Eve hangovers.

Now Ms Creighton is the Fine Gael hangover from hell that has delivered to them the biggest headache of the party season — a new party ready to attack them from the right.

In forthright media appearances over the weekend, the former Europe minister has loudly told us what she is against, but has been unusually quiet on what she is specifically for.

We have had grand, but sweepingly bland, sound-bites about backing the entrepreneur spirit and keeping Government in check while reforming our democratic institutions — but very little detail.

In a rare glimpse of substance, Ms Creighton has stated she wants to keep the hated water tax, but would like to abolish the even more unpopular Universal Social Charge. We still have no idea though, how she intends to make up the €4bn a year that tax brings in to keep this debt-laden country and its battered public services ticking over.

On coalition trysts, Ms Creighton insists she will be chooser, not beggar, ruling out propping up Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in government, and ridiculing any chance of finding common ground with Sinn Féin or the Lefty-pendents whom she paints as out of touch with economic reality.

So, is she proposing to launch a new party destined for permanent opposition?

Not quite, because, ever the bombast, Ms Creighton says she is prepared to go into government — but only on her terms, and only if the big boys agree to carry out her policies.

Yet, those policies remain something of an enigma, as the deputy intends to use the next eight weeks to hold a series of public rallies to carve out what the unnamed party will actually offer people, and use the resultant publicity to try and attract the funding of some €1m the new political organisation needs to really get off the ground and make an impact.

Ms Creighton insists that, after a year of secret manoeuvrings, she has 16 candidates ready to go and is well on course to see the organisation stand in every constituency in the country, though co-founder of The Party With No Name, Eddie Hobbs, is still coy over whether he will himself fight in the general election.

The Reboot Ireland banner has less than two months to prove it is not just the Lucindanistas, or Creightonites — an entity primarily intended to draw attention to its central player and ensure her own re-election — but a broad-based national movement capable of drawing much wider support and living up to its grand claims to reinvent Irish politics for the better.

But whichever way the chips fall, Lucinda is right where she always wants to be — at the centre of the political limelight.