Sir, – A particular story told by the late lamented Ted Nealon – whom I knew along with his friend John Healy when we were on the Irish Press staff – deserves to be on public record. It concerns the provenance of the Liam Cosgrave "mongrel foxes" reference to the Garret FitzGerald clique who were said to be plotting his downfall as leader of Fine Gael.
Many years later Ted told me that he sat at the press table in Cork as Cosgrave addressed the annual Fine Gael gathering. With the copy of the script in front of him he was re-reading in tandem, awaiting off-the-cuff quotable remarks. Suddenly, he noticed that Cosgrave was reading again from an earlier page. No one seemed to notice.
He looked up and saw that Cosgrave was shuffling the pages to get back on track. As he did so, the wily huntsman talked about the mongrel foxes who, he said, were out to derail the party. It is probably the only quote that has survived from that Fine Gael gathering. – Yours, etc,
JOE FOYLE,
Sandford Road,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.