Gilmore a lonely figure as he stands behind his man

DÁIL SKETCH: NORMALLY VOCAL backbenchers were silent yesterday when Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore faced an Opposition challenge in the Dáil on Kevin Cardiff's precarious path to the European Court of Auditors.

The silence showed that Taoiseach Enda Kenny, the Tánaiste and their Cabinet colleagues will be on their own if their efforts to have the Department of Finance secretary general appointed to the €276,000-a-year post come unstuck.

Earlier, backbenchers had no difficulty in rowing in behind the Tánaiste when Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald accused Labour of breaking its election promises.

“Yesterday the Taoiseach promised he would make an honest man of the Tánaiste,” said Ms McDonald. “Some will say he will have his work cut out for him.”

As Gilmore wore the thunderous expression of somebody who felt his honour had been impugned, fellow Labour TD Colm Keaveney rushed to his defence. “Sinn Féin went from robbing banks to bailing them out,” he declared.

McDonald said Labour had promised to end big pensions and salaries. “Sinn Féin robbed the banks and it robbed the people,” said Keaveney.

Noting that Cardiff’s nomination had been rejected by the European Parliament’s budgetary committee, McDonald said the Tánaiste should not have proceeded with the nomination and should now withdraw it.

The Tánaiste made it clear that the Government was standing by its man. Despite his trenchant defence, though, he was on his own, apart from some whispered advice from fellow Minister Brendan Howlin. The backbenchers were ominously silent.

That silence continued when Independent TD Shane Ross noted that Cardiff was the only one of the eight nominees before Wednesday’s committee hearing not to get the all-clear. It was a humiliation, not only for the candidate but also for the Government and the country,.

He asked how the Government could nominate the sole survivor of the “shameful night” of the bank guarantee.

No backbencher was prepared to contradict Ross by way of the traditional heckle.

Insisting the Government had nominated the right person for the job, the Tánaiste took the high moral ground.

The Government, in its desire to have a politician-free zone when allocating the lucrative job, had nominated a senior civil servant.

He said there had been considerable public criticism that previous nominees were retired politicians.

Those politicians, by the way, included the Tánaiste’s highly regarded party colleague Barry Desmond, who was nominated by a government which included Labour in the 1990s.

Sinn Féin’s Peadar Tóibín said nobody believed the Tánaiste. The ongoing silence of the backbenchers suggested a considerable degree of scepticism on their part also.