Noonan the brave in no mood for a twinkle-toed Parisian waltz

SKETCH:MICHAEL NOONAN in a crinoline, with a big head of curls on him, waltzing around the fleshpots of Europe in the arms of the president of France. Now there's an image they never envisioned in the Five-Point Plan.

The Minister for Finance, it has to be said, is steadfastly refusing to dance. Like a reluctant debutant, Baldy is clinging valiantly to the Walls of Limerick.

No suave monsieur is going to compromise his financial virtue. (At least not for a mere €150 million interest rate reduction. What does he take him for?) The nuns warned him about men like Nicolas Sarkozy.

With no small amount of pride, Michael told the Dáil yesterday that he would continue to rebuff his advances. “I’m not going to be waltzed around by any member states,” is how he delicately put it.

Twinkle-toes Sarkozy is only after the one thing – Ireland’s corporation tax. And Noonan, brave child of the Confraternity City that he is, isn’t going to let him have his wicked way.

It may be just a little pre-election tryst to Monsieur Le President, but the Minister for Finance passionately believes the deflowering of his corporation tax will lead to the surrender of “the heart and soul of our industrial strategy”. And that will send us careering down the long road to economic perdition.

So Michael Noonan will not be lacing up his crinoline and readjusting his ringlets for the foreseeable future.

Carla Bruni will be delighted, although as she approaches her confinement, she’ll have something to say to her husband about trying to do the Blue Danube with a silver-tongued teacher from the banks of the Shannon.

This does not mean the Minister intends being a wallflower forever. He told Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty that he intended going into the market when the time is right, possibly in the third quarter of next year.

Deputy Doherty doesn’t believe this will happen.

Minister Noonan was scandalised. “If you want to scaremonger and frighten the children and talk about the boodeyman (sic) coming down the chimney in two years’ time . . . go right ahead and do it!”

Michael is determined to keep positive and will go waltzing when it’s right and proper to do so.

(“Boodeyman”, according to a colleague from Cork, is what he called the bogeyman when he was a child. “I only learned about the bogeyman when I came to Dublin.”) We felt quite undone by Noonan’s fortitude. It’s like a Jane Austen novel in Leinster House, sometimes.

Indeed, were it not for nice Mr Martin’s predicament, we would have surrendered ourselves entirely to the thrilling story of the dashing Frenchman and the spirited but virtuous Minister.

But Micheál Martin was looking a little peaky. He wanted to know what the Government planned to do about the E.coli epidemic in Germany. “Has an inter-agency task force been established?” Micheál Martin used to love setting up agencies and task forces back in the day when he was a minister.

The Taoiseach told him that the relevant agencies were carefully monitoring the situation here and there were no indications that imported vegetable produce had been affected and no case of illness had been reported.

He still looked worried. This is probably because he is very health conscious and has been known to proselytise on the benefits of salads to people trying to tuck into fry-ups in the Dáil canteen.

As he lives on a diet of nuts, lettuce and fruit, it is widely suspected the Fianna Fáil leader has been existing solely on bananas since the E.coli outbreak a week ago. Bananas, of course, come with their own protective skin.

Enda tried to assuage Micheál’s fears, but you could see he was not happy, but that may just have been down to the hunger.

Joe Higgins proved a distraction when he accused the Government of arrogance. “Arrogance is not a characteristic that is either genetically endowed or politically acquired by the members of this Government in the last 100 days,” replied the Taoiseach, precipitating a wave of cross-party head-scratching.

Then Joe became distracted by taunts from Enda’s backbenchers and confused the Ceann Comhairle with the Taoiseach.

The Socialist Party leader apologised, blaming “some of these deputies behind the Taoiseach, whose levels of oratory still haven’t recommended me to find out their names” for putting him off.

“That’s arrogance,” trumpeted Leo Varadkar.

And everyone waltzed off for the afternoon. Except Michael Noonan, who isn’t dancing.