Time will tell if Labour will be at the races

It takes a brave party to allow its leader to visit a brewery, go through a mill, and then pose a nose behind statues of horses just hours after a poll showed it languishing badly in the election race.

And even more so when the starting point is beside a river which legend has it was created by a queen, who then drowned. But that is exactly what Labour did in Co Louth yesterday, as it attempted to place the spotlight on the jobs created by the last government and what it is promising voters if re-elected.

As Tánaiste Joan Burton and local constituency candidates super junior minister Ged Nash and senator Mary Moran were ushered into the Boann Distillery in Drogheda next to the river of the same name to launch the party’s jobs plan for the coming campaign, the senior figures gave a stout defence of their poll position.

We’re not worried, last orders for the Coalition is miles away, they insisted.

But the idea Labour and Fine Gael are struggling to co-ordinate their “stability” message, the political equivalent of failing to plan a piss up in a brewery, was the ongoing hangover to the party.

As they left for the nearby start-up hub facility The Mill, something the opposition believe they were already in, the trio again stressed the benefits of the recovery for those seeking work.

Developers creating a new shoot-em-up computer game drove home the image of Labour seeking to fire economic bullets back at its detractors.

But standing in a second room beside books called The Buying Brain, Trust Agents, and Power Questions helped return one or two salvos their way.

After visiting the nearby Horseware Ireland clothes site in Dundalk, Labour were soon back in the “economic recovery” saddle. Although Ms Burton’s decision to pose a nose behind two statues of horses was not quite the image handlers will want to portray given yesterday’s poll.

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