It's the era of Dave - and Inda's come up smelling of Tory

DÁIL SKETCH:SHINY DAVE was hardly in the door of 10 Downing Street before Inda began playing footsie with him.

Suddenly, the Fine Gael leader was sounding like a man who fell headlong into a Eurosceptic tank and came up smelling of Tory.

Over here, Prime Minister Cameron! It’s me, Inda Kinny – a true blue, just like you. We’re sooo alike: two happening young blokes with groovy hair and very strong views on the European project. I know we’ll work well together when I replace our unpopular prime minister here in Éire, just as you did on the mainland this week . . .

Enda Kenny put on quite a show in the Dáil. David Cameron will be most impressed.

“Leave us in control of our own economic affairs,” pleaded Kenny as he rejected the controlling hand of the EU in Ireland’s budgetary affairs.

Is the man mad? Leave us in control of our economic affairs? Look where that got us.

But with the Conservatives back in No 10, Enda had been bitten by the bulldog breed.

Back off Fritz! No thanks, Tintin! That was the message he imparted from Fine Gael, the party which regularly asserts its pro-European Christian Democrat credentials and boasts about its membership of the European People’s Party. In fact, Enda is vice-president of the EPP.

But here he was during Leaders’ Questions, wailing about the loss of Ireland’s sovereignty and our hard-won right to mismanage our own affairs without nosy foreign bureaucrats and their garlicky friends sticking in their noses.

It was bizarre, as if Continental Enda went to bed on Tuesday night but Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party woke up yesterday morning.

Kenny is horrified at the thought of Brussels snooping in our economic toolbox.

He wanted the full detail of a proposal that countries submit their draft budgets to Europe for scrutiny by other member states before parliaments have a chance to vote on them.

It was merely an effort to improve “budgetary policy co-ordination”, said Brian Cowen, who is lucky that “a surveillance of budgetary issues” by less easily swayed peers wasn’t around when he was minister for finance.

Inda, though, could see an appalling vista opening up before him. A future devoid of the nod and the wink, hugger-mugger in boardrooms and general incompetence. “I want an assurance from you,” he demanded of the Taoiseach, “that in no circumstances will this Government hand over sovereignty of the running of our economy to anybody else who might have a very different view.”

Across the way, Dick Roche, the Minister for Europe, pulled faces and tut-tutted like a scandalised dowager confronted by naked piano leg.

The Taoiseach didn’t give any assurances to Enda. He didn’t supply any detail either. It was like he was a bit embarrassed by the proposal too, coming so soon after his annual visit to Arbour Hill for the 1916 commemoration.

Instead, he said the Government is doing great things on the “fiscal discipline” front and has already saved us from making a holy show of ourselves in front of the rest of Europe.

“We are committed to taking the necessary action on the difficult choices,” he declared.

As he spoke of the need for adjustments to the structural deficit, his Minister for Agriculture was out in Kildare Street partaking of a photo opportunity. It provided a chilling metaphor of what is to come.

While Biffo waxed on about a “multi-annual plan”, a grinning Brendan Smith was fleecing a petrified hogget on the pavement next to the 14a bus stop.

A group of worried-looking tots dressed up in Little Bo Peep costumes watched on.

They didn’t look half as worried as the half shorn sheep rolling an anxious eye up at the big red-faced man in a navy suit looming over it with an electric razor.

It could be argued that Brendan Smith’s half-fleeced hogget represents the ordinary people of Ireland and Fintan O’Toole before they rise up and overcome the fat-cat oppressor.

We mention Fintan because Senator Terry Leyden appeared to think the Irish Timescolumnist, who addressed Tuesday night's Right to Work rally in Parnell Square before it left for Leinster House, incited a breakaway crowd of the usual suspects to try and burst their way into Leinster House. O'Toole didn't actually go on the march.

“It is very serious when Fintan O’Toole is inciting them,” pronounced Leyden in the Seanad. He doesn’t let the facts intrude on a good opportunity to attack the unsympathetic media.