Has anyone ever stopped to think that all this talk about “issues” and “responsibility” might yet have a very detrimental effect on the Presidency? Certainly, it is having a very worrying effect on Brian Lenihan. The idea of his campaign is very simple: he is behaving as a candidate in precisely the same way as he would (will?) behave as President. One of the consequences of this is that he no longer makes jokes, or at least not in public.
Seriousness is the watchword. On the bus on the way from Dublin to Bray yesterday, someone asked him if he is not losing his sense of humour. The Brian Lenihan we saw on “Questions and Answers” the previous evening was not the Brian Lenihan we had come to know and love, the questioner said. He had seemed embattled and defensive. He did not deflate his opponents with the pinprick of a joke as in days of yore. In fact, Brian Lenihan no longer even makes the kind of joke he was best at, i.e. at the expense of himself.
"But the questions were very serious," Brian Lenihan said seriously. "They were hard questions. I wanted to avoid any flip approach."
But is the requisite-gravitas question of the Presidency inhibiting the Tanaiste’s natural good humour? No, he wouldn’t say that. “Naturally I am good-humoured, noisy and boisterous by nature,” he said. “But I have a sense of humour that has been misconstrued over the years. Irony and humour can be deliberately misconstrued by people.”
The Lenihan campaign comprises three ingredients: walkabouts, public rallies and local radio interviews. He arrived at Horizon Radio in Bray yesterday, in time to help the station celebrate its first birthday. But first there was the interview.
Brian Lenihan has a happy knack of giving the same set of answers to any combination of questions. If asked to name the seven dwarfs, for example, it is very likely he would say something like: “Practical potential. Democratic legitimacy. Community awareness. Inspiration model. Stimulate investment, Fundamental protection. And non-executive leadership.”
Then he cut the cake and, on being told that Horizon is a community rather than a privately-owned station, expressed disappointment that he hadn’t known in time to “boost the community aspect”.
In Bray, the Tanaiste met the Bray Festival queen, the President of the Chamber of Commerce and had his photo taken with a young girl who recently had a lung transplant.
In the local Loreto Convent, he was swamped by schoolgirls wanting him to autograph their Fianna Fail headbands complete with logo: “Home and Away the Best Team”.
Then we headed further into “Glenroe” country, to Greystones, Wicklow and Arklow, the day scheduled to finish with a rally in Aughrim.
The turn-out was mainly of the Dinny and Denise generation, with Biddys and Mileys [characters in the RTÉ soap opera Glenroe] fairly thin on the ground. But this may have been the time of day.
Most people just wanted to shake the Tanaiste’s hand, give him a kiss or get his autograph. A dozen or so protesters in Bray delivered themselves of the view that there is “no British justice” and advised that there be “no extraditions”, but Mr Lenihan did not appear to know what they were talking about. Perhaps he thought they were joking.
After Greystones, the Tanaiste disappeared for a while in the company of Dick Roche, TD, a man who looks like he was born wearing a pinstripe suit. When they returned, Dick informed all and sundry that they had been to visit the nuns in the Carmelite convent in Delgany. The nuns had prayed for Brian in his recent illness and he wanted to thank them.
Dick said that we weren’t to mention this, because he said the Carmelites are an enclosed order and have to get a special dispensation to vote. Why this prevented us from mentioning them was unclear.
Perhaps Dick, with his legendary prescience, could foresee headlines about the Tanaiste having “a Carmelite in one hand and a ballot box in the other”, and very sensibly wanted to nip such frivolity in the bud.
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Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com
