BACK PAGES:JOHN HEALY opened up the coverage of politics with Backbencher's weekly Inside Politics column throughout the 1960s. In a style not applied previously to Irish politics, he sometimes used fictional devices to deliver his own mixture of fact and gossip and create the impression of being an insider. One such example was this extract of a supposed chat between taoiseach Seán Lemass, The Boss Man, and himself, BB, while trout fishing on Beltra Lake as speculation about Cabinet re-shuffles and Lemass's future circulated, writes JOE JOYCE
The Boss Man: A boring week in the House
BB: You did your best to liven it up. Everyone got great value out of the best Cabinet in the world – yourself most of all.
The Boss Man: You have to say something. And some of them are fairly good.
BB: I wouldn’t say Joe Brennan was exactly George Brown .
The Boss Man: No, but there’s no need for him to be a George Brown. He’ll stay where he is – himself and young Lenihan keep their departments turning over nicely.
BB: Dynamos!
The Boss Man: Just so long as they don’t short circuit things one is happy.
BB: Speaking of which reminds me about our Spent Gnat, dear Erskine .
The Boss Man: Why does poor Erskine so annoy all of you? He’s a hard-working poor little devil, and he is quite brilliant.
BB: So brilliant, in fact, that he tends to bore people.
The Boss Man: Precisely, precisely. We have a distrust of intellectual politicians in Ireland.
BB: Or of someone who, in addition to speaking Her Majesty’s English as it should be spoken, manages to speak a few foreign languages as well.
The Boss Man: Precisely. He has shown a fundamental grasp of economic politics which few men in the Cabinet have.
BB: Except maybe Mick Hilliard who, if he can’t express it just as elegantly, gets the message over just as well when he reassures us at Cabinet that you can’t take money out of the kitty if it’s not there.
The Boss Man: Michael has sound common sense: you don’t spend your life sharpening wits with the cattle dealers of Connacht without learning something.
BB: A line which might belong to your son-in-law, Charles .
The Boss Man: The Golden Boy!
BB: If you will! As I say in the column, you do me much honour. He has been getting a tough time lately. It has even been suggested that he was thinking of getting out of politics.
The Boss Man (with traditional wolfish smile): Indeed! It takes all kinds of stories to fill the columns in the silly season – both of us are supposed to be interested in the Hospitals’ Trust chairmanship. An old campaigner like yourself must have found that amusing.
BB: Shall we say that we understand? The man who lives in the lobby echoes whispers and you must appreciate that not everybody shares our unique relationship.
The Boss Man: But surely they read us last week when we said I wasn’t going to be in a hurry? Surely no one thinks Charles, for instance, would get out when his future is so promising.
The Boss Man: You and I may know about Charles but there is a different Charles in the whispering lobby.
www.irishtimes.com/ newspaper/archive/1966/0618/ Pg008.html#Ar00800