Taoiseach comes bearing metaphors so weighty that his podium collapses

Enda Kenny named the Budget date at Fine Gael’s Mayo think-in but was swiftly corrected

IN PUBLIC relations terms, you have to wonder at the value of political parties’ think-ins. The visuals of the barriers, the massed gardaí and the protest groups are hardly a spin doctor’s ideal. And that’s omitting the potential for Garglegate-style eruptions. Or a deputy falling off a mountain.

Among the afternoon attractions, after the “political priorities” session, is a plan to get the lads and lassies to climb Croagh Patrick or to the ride a bicycle on the famous Green Way. What to do?

Find “urgent” business to attend to in the constituency or show your chops to the boss?

Yesterday, the external excitement was limited to seven enterprising anti-Shell protesters who cut in through the fields, slipped through a hedge, got all the way up the steps of Knockranny House and into the lobby before gardaí, who outnumbered them by two to one, bundled them out again.

Back on the steps, a couple – the man was from Slovakia and had arrived about a year ago to join the protest – stood miserably beside the massed hi-vis gardaí, with a banner denouncing corporate thuggery, and the woman banging a potato masher on a pot lid.

An American tourist pulled up in a Ford Galaxy and stood to behold the scene: “So this is the welcoming committee?”, she asked of no one in particular.

Internally, the excitement was contained, to put it nicely.

The FG troops took a liking to Seán O’Sullivan of Dragons’ Den but found Donal Donovan’s session deeply depressing. “Just give me a gun”, said an eye-rolling backbencher after that one.

“He’s quite pessimistic”, said Brian Hayes about the former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund. “But if I had a euro for every pessimistic economist I’ve met down the years, I’d be a very wealthy man.”

Dr Donovan’s big spiel, said a senior Minister, is to tell the public everything that’s coming at them, two years in advance. What’s wrong with that? “But that doesn’t make political sense. That’s like saying, ‘Here’s two years to prepare your campaign.’”

The Taoiseach arrived for his lunchtime “doorstep” looking perky, took a satisfied look at the media who had crossed the country to crowd around the rope line, and recalled a party meeting not too many years ago, “when one national journalist turned up, on the second day, after lunch”.

And here we were, hanging on his every word under some serious chandeliers with bottles of Ballygowan and bowls of Richie’s Mints laid on the tastefully arranged tables to keep his troops diverted during the speeches.

Three sentences in, his lectern collapsed. As aides scrambled to round up the mics, phones and tape recorders and hunkered down to keep the lectern upright, he didn’t miss a beat, supporting it with a thumb.

How were people to find the money to pay a property tax when most had barely €100 to spare at the end of the month? asked Catherine Halloran of the Star newspaper.

“Well, they’re in a hotel here which had its best August it had since the hotel was set up,” came the reply. The Knockranny is a lovely hotel, and even offered linen napkins with the media’s sandwiches. But it’s hardly a destination for the average family with €100 a month to spend.

Anyway, he said, the property tax hadn’t even been considered by the Government. But it would be in the “not too distant future” and people would know “in good time and in advance what it means”. Whatever that meant.

Wasn’t he a bit concerned that Ministers kept contradicting themselves and one another, asked Ursula Halligan of TV3?

“But sure you love that, Ursula – the more contradictions that you can get, the better it is for yourself.”

Maybe, but it hardly answered the question.

He did tell us the budget date: December 7th. Later, it dawned on us that the 7th was a Friday. What was that about? “It’s the day before all the boggers go to Dublin to do their shopping,” suggested a bogger.

“It’s the day in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour – ‘The Day Which Will Live in Infamy’”, intoned a journo. What a marvellous metaphor.

Alas, when Michael Noonan appeared on the lawn, against the magnificent backdrop of Croagh Patrick and Clew Bay, he did his wheezy laugh and said it was a “typo”. The date was December 5th. But the metaphor wasn’t lost on him. His current fun reading happens to be the third volume of a biography of US president Lyndon Johnson, which relates how the president had planned to make a big announcement on December 7th but cancelled it because of the Pearl Harbour association.

And had he plans for a second day’s budget like last year?

“We might do a Riverdance,” he chuckled to a big media laugh and a lot of head-scratching.

We think he meant for the interval act.

“That was a joke”, he said afterwards, “a joke”.

Isn’t that a pity all the same?