Enda keen to drag up FF's murky past but patient Micheál just counts to 100

DÁIL SKETCH:THE PAST has a nasty habit of catching up with you.

Just ask Fianna Fáil: when the finish line loomed in the last election, its past rocketed by and left the party for dead.

Fine Gael, home and poised on the other side of the tape, leaned forward and gratefully gathered in the onrushing history. And, ever since, Enda Kenny and his Ministers have been merrily flogging Fianna Fáil’s past around an interminable lap of honour.

True, that beast has quite a pedigree. It has legs and more than enough in the tank to keep going for a long time. But not forever.

You can’t keep flogging a dead horse and Fianna Fáil is perilously close to that condition now.

Yet the Government is determined to squeeze every last bit of mileage out of their main Opposition’s track record (particularly if it draws attention away from how they are constructing their own). One thing is sure, Fianna Fáil’s recent past is not going to provide the Government with the key to perpetual political motion.

It didn’t stop Enda complaining to Micheál Martin: “We’re stuck with the lousy deal you struck.” How come we never thought of that? It’s not for the want of the Taoiseach telling us.

Which brings us nicely back to the past, by way of the future, which can come back to haunt a new government that has set ambitious 100-day deadlines for itself.

The future is steaming up on the inside now. Those deadlines are very, very close.

Micheál Martin can’t wait. So he put a question down “to ask the Taoiseach if he will provide a progress report on the programme for government as he approaches his first 100 days in office”. Sadly, time ran out before Enda could address it. Somehow, we knew that would happen.

The past is a lovely place for Government backbenchers. A time when they had hope and big plans and thought they could change the world.

The old guard had years to dream on the Opposition benches of what they might do come the electoral revolution.

Only a few months ago, the new intake was carried, shoulder high, into Leinster House as proud mammies wept and supporters danced on the plinth.

“Made it Ma! Top of the world!” Now they find they are bottom of the pile and the most important thing they must do is remember to turn up for a vote.

It all seemed so exciting, in the past.

Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party hasn’t much time for Government backbenchers. As far as he sees it, they have so little to do they are now amusing themselves by hectoring him during Leaders’ Questions.

“The Ceann Comhairle will have to do something about discipline on the Government side. It is getting increasingly difficult to make rational points,” he pleaded, not without cause.

Joe knows the reason for their giddiness: they are looking for attention now that they have made it to the top of the world and into the Dáil.

“Many of them are not at all resigned to their lowly status – that seems to be the problem. Maybe the Taoiseach should give them each a board of scrabble or snakes and ladders every morning to keep them busy while we are trying to make serious points here,” he suggested.

Meanwhile, the Minister for Education was waxing nostalgic in The Irish Timesabout doing his Leaving Cert. He mused he wouldn't get into UCD to study architecture today with the results he received.

The Taoiseach commended Ruairí Quinn for being “honest and truthful enough” to say this.

“Pity he wasn’t as honest and truthful with regard to college fees,” snorted Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher, who was a junior minister, in the past.

And some of us thought, being honest and truthful about it, that a comfortable, middle-class boy like Ruairí would walk into UCD today.

The past isn’t that different.

Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald read the Taoiseach a passage from the Fine Gael manifesto about renegotiating the EU-IMF bailout.

That was then, this is now, was the gist of Enda’s reply. Which should have gone down well with a Sinn Féin woman, but didn’t.

But we were past caring, by then.