INSIDE POLITICS - TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR THIS GOVERNMENT

THERE are four years, eight months and six days left until the next general election.


That means only one thing — the Government has left it too late to save their skins. They are toast already.

Ah yes, you say. A resurgent Fine Gael will become even more resurgent and will wipe the floor with them. Ermmm, no.

By the way they are shaping up so far, Fine Gael look like they will be merely spectators to the Government’s demise. I was speaking to a senior Fine Gael backroom person during the week and asked him about the state of play of its strategic planning for the next five years.




The answer I got was that there isn’t a strategy, not yet. The reasons?

It’s only a couple of months since a tough election. The new front bench needs to bed itself in. Give it a bit of time.

It was — and I didn’t quibble — a reasonable explanation. But it was also wrong.

Just as a week can be a long time in politics, a five-year term can be a short time in politics. And we have seen a couple of examples in the past week of Fine Gael spokespeopleopposing just for the sake of opposing and offering no cohesive or original proposals of its own (and before you correct me, the otherwise smart Charlie Flanagan’s suggestion to call in the army was not original).

And so in the new Dáil term, we have seen FG take up where it left off before the election. We don’t know if it’s still relying on the three pillars on which it fought the election campaign — health, crime and value for money — but it seems to be. And that’s a mistake.

There’s a school of thought within FG that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it — continue with the strategy that won it 20 seats and sure, won’t it yield even more?

A couple of weeks ago, FG’s young blade Leo Varadkar wrote in a posh newspaper arguing that far from trumpeting its success, FG should be flagellating itself for failing to win the election.

The campaign (ie the superficial razzmatazz) was professional, but wasn’t enough. “We did not win the policy debates. We showed an unwillingness to take clear positions. We did not demonstrate competence to run the economy.”

As an example, he said, the party, by concentrating on the narrow issue of stamp duty (pandering to a skewed and perverse Sunday Independent campaign), abandoned imaginative plans for a 30% income tax for middle earners. To that end, they could learn from the flair that Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne has shown in terms of policy and presentation.

Mr Varadkar’s argument that Fine Gael “will have to look like modern Ireland” sounds like it comes straight out of David Cameron’s rulebook.

FG needs to do all of those things. But already, it’s beginning to look like it might not need to bother. The PDs already look like goners. There’s no dynamic for change within FF, which means that Brian Cowen and others will bide their time even if Bertie Ahern stays on until 2011.

If that happens, whoever succeeds him will be leading Fianna Fáil into opposition.

And the Green Party? The incinerator debate this week underlined the innate weakness of its position in Government. The media and opposition honed in not on John Gormley’s argument that Ireland will need two rather than eight incinerators, but on his tacit acceptance that incinerators will be needed in the first place. That’s a big concession.

Its biggest enemy will be time. In the Programme for Government, the Greens got a commitment to an international review of national waste policy. And it’s been agreed. That’s fine. But it won’t be completed until 2009. And by the time they’ve gone through the hoops of approval, procurement and delivery, it will be — well, way beyond 2012.

And with an economy beginning to feel the squeeze, its own big flagship issues — the annual 3% reduction in carbon emissions; the big push towards renewable and alternative forms of energy — will encounter resistance from FF ministers.

The Greens know that FF has red lines and is not prepared to cross them. So many of what the Greens want is predicated on reviews, reports, promises and vague aspirations (stuff that can be kicked into the blue yonder). Green ministers and their advisers are still talking naively about how nice FF ministers have been to them. But in technical terms that’s called a honeymoon period.

If they don’t start picking a couple of fights with the Big Beasts of FF soon, they’ll find themselves with nothing tangible to show. There are four years, eight months and five days left. But if they don’t start moving, it will be too late.

INSIDE POLITICS - OPPOSITION STRATEGY

At the end of every term, I do a simple exercise, totting up the topics that have been chosen by opposition leaders for the twice-weekly set piece Leaders' Questions.

Over the last couple of years, the predictable issues have dominated - health, crime, and the Government's secret weapon of dealing with Limerick's gang culture: unleashing Willie O'Dea in the city's drinking establishment on weekend nights.

The dynamic has changed this time. There are now only two leaders entitled to speak during Leaders Questions and one of them, Eamon Gilmore, is new. With the smaller parties and indepedendents having been hoovered up by Government or gobbled up by the electorate, there is no longer a technical group. There is no Joe Higgins. The Greens have forsaken tofu abstinence for meat indulgence. And Sinn Fein - this was meant to be another breakthrough election; it instead became a breakdown election. Down from five to four. No Mary Lou. Pearse Doherty in the Senate rather than in the Dáil.

So where once there were five, now there are two. It's very early days and I don't think that any of the opposition parties have got their heads around what strategies they will adopt to down the Government over the next five years.

With Labour's Gilmore, there has been a difference of style and nuance rather than substance so far - he is less confrontational; appealing more to reason and to common sense than Rabbitte was. For Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, it's been more of the same, leaving off where they left off before the election.

Fine Gael's big strategy last time was that the election would be won or lost on three big issues - health, crime and value for money. The party was wrong on all three issues. The election was won and lost on the economy.

So can we expect more PPARS, more attacks on health, more 'we are tougher than Terminator' on getting the criminal gang scum off the streets.

Well on the crime front, yes. Listening to Enda Kenny and Charlie Flanagan yesterday, it was deja vu all over again. Kenny repeated a phrase three times: "Who's in charge Taoiseach, the Government or the gangs?"

That had tabloid written all over it. But when Charlie Flanagan started talking about bringing the army onto the street as back-up, that really took the pip. Brian Lenihan should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, foolishly, the Justice Minister actually said he would refer it to the Garda Commissioner. I mean, if you follow that line of argument, the next thing is that we will impose martial law on the street and people will begin to consider the sense of Eoghan Harris's baublings about armed gardai shooting it out with criminals and the return of capital punishment.

INSIDE POLIITICS - THIS WEEK'S COLUMN, ON BERTIE WHO ELSE!

There is a school of thought that if the report of the McCracken Tribunal into Charles Haughey’s venal trousering of other people’s money had come out a couple of months earlier, then politics would have had a different complexion over the past ten years.

The Report was published in August of 1997, over two months after the General Election of June 6. Some say that the findings of the report were so potentially catastrophic for Fianna Fail and for Bertie Ahern that if the report had been published before the election (in April or May of that year) that the three-party Rainbow coalition would comfortably have been returned to power.

I’m not so sure, not so sure at all. For one, Bertie Ahern was only a bit player in the saga surrounding payments to Charlie Haughey. Besides his little cameo (he unwittingly signing blank cheques for the party leader’s allowance) did not come to light until the Moriarty Tribunal began probing other aspects of Haughey’s personal finances.

There’s a well of forgiveness and understanding that exists in Irish society for public figures that just can’t be compared with any other democracy. My own instinct is that it’s because Ireland is a much smaller, more familiar, more intimate country than, say, Britain. And that people instinctually brand people who find themselves in sticky situations as ‘poor old divvils’ rather than ‘unmentionable so-and-sos’.

In Britain, we have seen so many ministers fall on their swords, sometimes for relatively minor transgressions. In Ireland, it needs to be in the neighbourhood of one of the seven deadly sins before it becomes career-threatening. And that's what happened to Haughey. He had long dried his well of understanding before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Posterity will recall some of his achievements but he will be primarily identified as a rogue.

The selfsame school of deep thought has made a return this week to ask the same ‘what if’ questions about Bertie Ahern. Would FF have saved the election if he had been called as a witness to the Tribunal earlier this year? Would he still be Taoiseach?

And of course, because he still is Taoiseach, there’s a second strand of reasoning. A couple of hits below the waterline might mean he will never make it to port. And this particular port of destination of course is September 2011 when Bertie Ahern reaches his 60th birthday. But of course nobody ever believed that this is feasible, that he will hand over the reins to the anointed one, Brian Cowen, eight or nine months shy of a general election.

In the best tradition of the ‘king is dead, long live the king’, there has been ongoing speculation about when Bertie Ahern will step down. Most predictions tend to hover around 2009 in or around the time of the local and European elections as a time of natural cleavage, to allow Ahern’s successor to bed himself or herself in.

The fly in the ointment is the planning tribunal and Bertie Ahern’s increasingly Byzantine explanations of those mysteriously big payments that went in and out of his account. The thinking has gone that if he fared badly at it and lost face, his tenure as leader of FF would come to an end within months.

For a long time, his Tribunal appearance looked like it would be a short sharp shock. But now it looks like it will grind on into another week, and that it will conclude just in time for the return of the Dáil and for an angry opposition to go onto the attack.

And it’s certain that he has shipped damage this week. His own protestation that he begged and pleaded and bended his knee to accommodate the Tribunal sounded a little bit hollow when Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill made public a couple of home truths. To wit, he only made the Tribunal aware in April this year that there were foreign exchange transactions involved in three of the four lodgements being examined. He also, according to O’Neill, did not include all the relevant information (particularly the fact that Celia Larkin was operating an account on his behalf) in an affidavit of discovery. Also, yesterday morning, it became apparent that at a very early stage in the process, on New Year’s Even 2004, he himself identified all the payments totalling E85,000 which now form the basis of the inquiry into his finances but did not disclose that information to the Tribunal for a long time.

But the question remains: what will it take to down him? My own sense is that it would have to be enormous and that is not likely to happen. His famous Teflon will suffer some deep gouges this week but not enough to render him inoperable. The opposition will go after him.

But career-ending? It was wrong and unethical of him to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends, and a large sum from businessmen in Manchester. Especially since he was a high officer of State, the serving Minister for Finance. I, for one, think that taking money like that should be career-ending.

But I'm not the Irish public. And the Irish public have forgiven him, in opinion polls, elections, and – I’m sure – in opinion polls again. The Irish public has a very special relationship with its political head, that’s closer to the cult of personality found in the middle east and some South American countries. The blows to his credibility are undoubted. But ultimately they are glancing rather than fatal.

INSIDE POLITICS - AER BLING-US

To lose one chief executive of Aer Lingus may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like callousness.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, that’s what the Government fears most when it comes to the Shannon Airport mess.

When Willie O’Dea spoke about Armageddon it was about the loss of the Heathrow slots to the mid-west. When the Government thinks of Armageddon, it is a scenario when Dermot Mannion and his top management team walk after being compromised by the Government at an EGM.

Bertie Ahern’s view of Mannion’s predecessor Willie Walsh was jaundiced. It was prompted by what he regarded as Walsh’s audacious cheek at proposing a management buy-out. It got so bad that if Walsh said he was going for walk, Ahern would have gone out of his way to ensure it was along the length of a plank.

Six months later – by which time Walsh had been forced out and had gone to British Airways – you could see that the Anorak was still all ripped up about it.

When Pat Rabbitte asked Ahern in the Dail was he going to give the go-ahead to privatise the airline, the Taoiseach rounded on him, and – by proxy – Willie Walsh.

“I am surprised Deputy Rabbitte is taking up a position that was opposed by every trade unionist in Aer Lingus, when management wanted to steal the assets for themselves through a management buy out, shafting staff interests. Deputy Rabbitte is now defending that position.”

And a little later, he added as an afterthought.

“I am glad those individuals (Willie Walsh and co) went on to prove their worth in the financial marketplace but at least they did not do it by taking the assets away from Aer Lingus.”

Stirring stuff from Red Bertie the Socialist comrade. We were all able to sleep easy in our beds that night. The assets were protected. They had been safely anoraked by the Taoiseach in the Dail.

And then a year later, Aer Lingus was floated. Or about 60% of it was. The employes got about 12% through another ESOT. And the State kept 25.4% which Martin Cullen, the then Transport Minister, told us was a ‘golden share’.

So we still didn’t need to worry about losing the assets. I won’t bore you with the details of the tome Cullen produced last October detailing how that golden share, that magic 25.4%, that cast-iron safeguard against the tyranny of unfettered capitalism would protect Aer Lingus’s assets. And Cullen spelled out what those assets were: they were primarily the Heathrow slots and the services from Dublin, Cork and Shannon.

So what was the difference between Willie Walsh stealing the assets and the Government floating the airline on the private market while retaining a 25.4% ‘golden share’?

None really. Except we got loads of bluster and self-serving bombast from Government when it went down the second avenue.

The golden share! What an abominable business cliché. If Cullen had read his Shakespeare he would have known enough about things that glisten not to mention golden shares.

We learned, when it was sprung on us at the start of August, that pulling the Shannon to Heathrow service was against the Government’s regional and aviation policy and was a disappointment. Though Martin Cullen never told us back in October, the Government knew back then that there was damn all it could do about it. What’s more if Aer Lingus decided to transfer all the Heathrow slots out of Ireland, Bertie the Bystander would live up to his name. He couldn’t do anything about it. Nada. Nothing. And what’s worse, there would be no Willie Walsh to blame.

The Minister for Finance as the nominated Government shareholder could only call an EGM if Aer Lingus ‘disposed of’ (ie sold) the slots rather than transfer them. What’s more, it got advice this week from the Attorney General Paul Gallagher that even if a majority of shareholders ordered management to reverse the decision on Shannon, the service could not be saved at this stage.

The current Transport Minister Noel Dempsey arrived into his Ministry just in time to see that plane take off from the runway. Asked this week about the purpose of the ‘golden share’ he replied that it can help repel a hostile takeover (as happened when RyanAir began huffing and puffing) and will also help prevent the disposal of Heathrow slots.

However, he admitted that down the line all of the Irish slots could be transferred to Dusseldorf or Taipei or Abu Dhabi. He made the fair point that this was highly unlikely, given the sheer volume of air traffic between the two islands of Ireland and Britian. But the point is that, politically, it makes a mockery of the Government’s stern prose from last autumn. It was selling us a pig in a poke back then. And what was worse it knew it.

The following is wild and groundless speculation on my part. But one of the reasons I believe the Government will back Dermot Mannion to the hilt is that otherwise Bertie Ahern will be forced to back an aviation boss he dislikes even more intensely than Willie Walsh.

INSIDE POLITICS - NEGOTIATONS

Charlie McCreevy once said that he knew Bertie Ahern better than most and, at that, he knew him only 20%.

Fianna Fail took most people by surprise whey they held their first formal discussions with the Greens yesterday, moving much more quickly than was anticipated to expand their options on forming government.

But anyone who thinks the serious nature of the talks with the Greens – and the seriousness is particularly evident from the smaller party – signifies that this is now the option the FF is pursuing is mistaken.

At the same time, Fianna Fail is doing its business on all fronts. Dealings are continuing with the rump of the PDs and also with the independents – significantly Michael Lowry issued his first statement yesterday confirming that he too had been contacted by the Government.

He said: "I accepted an invitation from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to negotiate on the terms of my involvement in a cross-party alliance to provide a stable government."

The latest overture by Fianna Fail to Lowry brings to twelve the number of TDs it might include in government.

Sources in Fianna Fail have spoken about forming its own kind of rainbow, with the PDs, the Greens and independents.

The downside of that arrangement is that Fianna Fail would have sacrifice more cabinet positions than what its own TDs consider necessary – at least two senior ministries (one each to the PDs and, at the very minimum, to the Greens) and at least two so-called ‘super junior’ ministries.

The other is that the Greens are to some FF rural TDs what reds were to McCarthyite Americans in the 1950s. They look at the Greens’ stances on corporate donations, on roads, on carbon taxes, on once-off housing and they see meddlers. However, of all the parties, FF backbenchers know their place and if a deal is struck with the deals, they will go along with it obediently while grumbling privately.

There’s a couple of problems for the Greens too, that are not all that easy to get over. For one, Trevor Sargent will have to step down as leader if they do a deal with Fianna Fail or else he will be accused of blatant inconsistency.

Secondly, the party is going to have a tough job convincing its members – and its potential supporters in future elections – that it is doing right by the country by going into government while at the same time ceding some of its core principles including a ban on corporate donations; carbon taxes, and transport policies.

The party really wants to go into government. But a sardonic political veteran observed yesterday. “If the Green Party is prepared to compromise on core principles so that it can wallow in high office, they will get hammered.”

From the moment that a third-term was confirmed, Mr Ahern has continued to speak about a Government of stability and longevity. In other words, what he wants is one that lasts for five years, come hell, high water, or further damaging Tribunal allegations.

Part of that equation is numbers. If he has four or five TDs above the magic 83 mark, it will allow the Government some breathing space, and make the government of the country over the next five years less of a hairy roller-coaster ride, where the government will always be vulnerable to a defection or an illness that gives the opposition a chance to defeat the government in the chamber.

However, the corporate memory within Fianna Fail still has bitter memories of the manner in which the most secure majority of all time – that with the Labour Party in 1992 – fell asunder amid mutual recrimination just two years later.

We tend to attribute a Machiavellian slant to everything Ahern says, and McCreevy's 20% assessment gives credence to this. But maybe he's been right all along and his preferred solution is the PDs and independents and he’s sounding out the Greens just to see if it’s a feasible option.

In another sense, he may be playing them all off one against the other to maximise FF’s negotiating position and minimise what the smaller parties might demand in relation to ministries and policy concessions.

And there are some who say that all of this talking is a prelude to FF approaching Labour with an unbeatable offer in the run-up to June 14th, knowing that it has at least one or two other deals in the bag.

The only thing that’s certain is that Fianna Fail has all the chips on its side of the table and is in a powerful position.

But trouble may be coming down the tracks in the shape of the Quarryvale module and the fresh questions facing Mr Ahern.

There’s an element of ‘don’t mention the war’ about this issue. It’s quite possible that a deal can be negotiated with ‘moral high ground’ parties. Of course, the $64,000 question is the $45,000 question, if you get the drift. Will that be conveniently long-fingered for future consideration.

Expect a long week of horse-trading ahead.

INSIDE POLITICS - ENDA KENNY

I was looking at Enda Kenny waltzing around the midlands this evening and I thought to myself - in a fortnight's time this man could be Taoiseach.

One of the party pieces of the great Tyrone novelist, journalist and broadcaster Benedict Kiely was 'The Man from God Knows Where'.

It could have been written for Enda. Or to employ some other cliches that have been hacked around about him - 'the man who rose without trace' or 'the overnight success after almost 30 years'.

Somebody was interviewing him over the last couple of days (so much is happening that you lose track of everything - I think it was Sean O'Rourke) who described the Department of Tourism and Trade during his time as a 'happy' place (see how strong we political hacks are on detail). Ok, I know I'm hanging on a thread here but the gist of the interview was that Enda was a great motivator and that he energised those around him.

I'm sure that's true. He's got a fantastic personal touch. He's friendly, tactile, completely unaffected and very engaging.

A small diversion and then I'll make a point. Like checking out Blogorrah most days, I can't resist posting those satirical parodies like the Simon Cowell one two posts below this one. It's juvenile, cheap and usually very unfair. But it's good clean fun, as the man says. And the point? Well the X Factor satire kind of suits Enda. Because he has that hard-to-describe quality that Bertie has and that Bill Clinton had in spades. The presence of people, the thought of working a room, seems to electrify him.

But - and this is the question - does he have the mettle, the grist, and the granite to become Taoiseach. I remember an interview David Nally of PrimeTime did with him when he contested the leadership with Michael Noonan in 2001. Nally filleted him on the specifics of economic and tax policies.

He has improved over the past couple of years and tends to be very well briefed. But his grasp of detail can still let him down (unlike Bertie who can slew out statistics from morning to night) and he can get caught bang-to-rights when asked tricky supplemental questions.

In the past week, he has kicked to touch on the nurses dispute by saying that an imaginative solution is needed and talking in general terms about benchmarking. Is he in favour of the 10% increase or the reduction of hours to 35 per week? We just don't know.

He also tends to defer to Richard Bruton when the likes of George Lee and Brendan Keenan start asking tough and specific questions. And he has also done a bit of a Pontius Pilate act on the BertieGate saga by, well, not really making a judgement other than the sterile one that the Government is 100% souped.

The reason that Labour and Fine Gael have whistled and looked the other way is that they all got roasted in the polls last autumn. I personally think there was something very strange about the timing of this Quarryvale module, and the Tribunal's insistence on circulating Bertie Ahern's statement on the last Thursday of May (they were very naive if they believed that they wouldn't be leaked).

But once the statements were made public and open to scrutiny (irrespective of the fact they left Ahern playing against a stacked hand) they did raise genuine questions that go to the credibility of the politician who holds the first office. It was inevitable, cut also wholly legitimate, cruel as it is for him

I'm sure that Enda Kenny is well able to deal with all the issues above. But if Ahern's credibility is in question, the big puzzler that has always surrounded Enda Kenny is that of competence - does he have what it takes to become Taoiseach?

I thought of it tonight as I watched him waltzing around a hall in the midlands. I'm sure he has all the qualities (he's been very impressive this year; and he has a formidable presence like Rabbitte riding shotgun for him) but if BertieGate rumbles on for another week, that mettle might not be tested until he drives for the first time into Government Buildings in Merrion Street.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE DARK ARTS

ON POLITICS
Harry McGee
I opened my email inbox on Thursday morning and a wave of nostalgia washed over me.
There it was, the present we had been months waiting for, the sorcerer’s magic bag of dirty tricks and the propagandists guide to the dark arts of spin.

Like all the best surprises, the packaging gave little clue of what was to come.

"Fine Gael and Labour fail the Economic Test – Minister Brian Cowen", read the title.


I could hardly contain my excitement as I tore off the packaging like a kid on Christmas morning. I wasn’t disappointed. It was chock-a-block with colourful graphs, charts, figures and sums. It was obvious that they had spent weeks and week working on the magic potions and dark spells.

And Eureka, in the best tribute outside JK Rowling to Lord Voldemort, it contains dark spin that distorts over 100, yes 100, of the Mullingar Accord promises and casts them off into the abyss.

And its no Brian ‘prudent to the point of boring us all to death’ Cowen that we have here. It’s biffo in best biffing mode.

He is unsparing in his claims. Fine Gael and Labour, he contends, would plummet the country back into the red, and would be running up exchequer deficits of E5 billion by 2012.

(And the really mysterious thing about all this is that the equally extravagant promises made by Fianna Fail will somehow magically produce a break-even situation. Why? you may ask. Well, silly, because FF have ‘costed’ them! and they also have a more powerful magic wand).

Yes, after a five year absence, the Fianna Fail ‘rebuttal unit’ has swung back into action with a vengeance.

In a gleeful example of the dark arts, its release was timed for a few hours before Fine Gael and Labour launched their joint economic manifesto, thus giving us our first example of ‘prebuttal’ for this general election.

The moment that Fianna Fail begins to get its retaliation in first, you know that an election is on.

And for the first time, we got our first real sense during this week that the election campaign is in full hue and cry, that battle has been joined.

Remember, the Dáil is still in recess until next Tuesday but it’s clear that all the parties are on amber alert. There were a couple of ready reckoners for that. The week was swollen with press conferences and announcements (on the economy and jobs), by claims and by counter-claims.

Anyway, the revival of the ‘Rebutall Unit’ brought us back to this time five years ago. The election was called on April 25 with Bertie Ahern choosing the shortest possible election campaign of three weeks, with polling day set for May 17.

Within a 12 hours of the Dail being dissolved, Fianna Fail had launched its manifesto, majoring (unsurprisingly) on the economy. For the next week, there were exhaustive (and ultimately pointless) debates about whose figures best stood up to scrutiny. And of course the ‘Rebuttal Unit’ was busily fact-checking, claim-countering, and prebutting from the off.

Not that it mattered. If the campaign had lasted three days or three months, it would not have made a difference. The Government parties dominated the agenda throughout.
Fine Gael was on a loser going in. The party compounded its difficulties with moronic and meaningless promises on taxis and to reimburse Eircom shareholders. As leader, Michael Noonan was a 100% charisma free zone until the last televised debate. But by that stage it was all over bar the shouting.

From the off, the question was not about Fianna Fail winning but about how big the winning margin would be. In the event, a rout was prevented only by the intervention of a big bespectacled child. He shinned up a lamp-post with a catapult in his back pocket and took a couple of pot-shots at Bertie Ahern.

But this time it’s different. One of the things that’s disconcerting though is that so many of the issues and the problems (quality of life; transport, health, and crime) are exactly the same. And four years ago we all made the mistake of believing promises that could not be fulfilled. We learned from our mistakes. And it’s clear from the spate of crowd-pleasing promises made already that we will have to learn from our mistakes again.

But this time it’s different. Fianna Fail sense some trouble ahead. That’s why they were panicked into bringing their manifesto launch forward to the Ard Fheis.
With good reason. For when you lick your thumb and raise it in the air, we can feel the first few gusts of more bitter winds. This campaign will be sharper, closer, more brutal, more verbose, and more gale force than five years ago. But from which direction is change coming? Is it from the west (Kenny and Rabbitte) or will the prevailing easterlies (Ahern and McDowell) continue to prevail?

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE AHERN INTERVIEW

I interviewed Bertie Ahern last week and the piece appeared in the Irish Examiner on Easter Monday (full transcript of printed interview below). I have done hundreds of interviews during my career. And this is the first that I have ever done in Q and A format, rather than in the more conventional narrative style.

The Q and A style of interview was popularised by John Waters in his HotPress days (and he based it on interviews he used to read in the religious magazine, The Word). Vincent Browne was also partial to it, and also used it regularly during the time he was writing a weekly interview for the Irish Times.

In a way, you'd think it's an easier way of writing up interviews. All you do is transcribe the recording and Bob's your uncle! Not, not quite. A half an hour interview will produce about 4,000 words and unless you are writing for the New Yorker, it's not going to fit in. So it becomes an exercise in pruning.

Plus, it makes it harder to describe how a person reacts to a question. HotPress used to use (laughs) to convey laughter but it always read silly. A couple of times Bertie Ahern, while exceedingly pleasant throughout, commented in a hard-nosed and hard-chaw way to questions about political opponents. What I tried to do was describe all those kind of reactions, the timbre, the way he projected himself at the start.

For some reason, the Q and A format seemed very suited to this particular interview. He was more considered, more in-depth in answering questions than in previous interviews and he went to some lengthts to put context on some of his responses. By going for a straight narrative account, you would have lost a lot of the quotes to description and paraphrase. In a way, this interview is the edited highlights, rather than the match report from the next day.

THE INTERVIEW

Bertie Ahern, we are often told, does not obsess with his place in history, doesn’t have the need to leave vainglorious legacies like Tony Blair (reputedly) does.
But even before the nation decides his fate this summer, Ahern will have his place in modern Irish political history assured.
De Valera may have moulded the State; Lemass may have made it modern and outward looking but Ahern made it prosperous and also banished forever all inferiority complexes.
It’s too early, much too early, to judge how history and posterity will judge him. But arguably he now ranks second only to Dev in the FF pantheon.
But for all that, what is most disarming about him - and this goes a long way to explain his enduring appeal – is the sense of ordinariness he projects. His critics will claim that it’s a long time since he has had to use a petrol pump. And it is true that he himself is not shy when it comes to reminding people about the interests and achievements section of his C.V. Yet, when most people think of Bertie Ahern they think anorak.
As you are interviewing him, your are reminded a little of the GAA player or manager. When they are asked how they won crucial championship matches, it is never because they were a better team. No, it’s invariably because the media wrote them off.
It is ditto with Bertie Ahern who often points to his successes in terms of defying those who underestimate him, while also having a slight dig at the media and other detractors.
It’s clear too that there’s an election in the air because there’s a harder edge to his comments. In a wide-ranging interview he is much tougher than in previous Irish Examiner interviews, on the effects of Bertie-Gate, on opposition claims, on Fine Gael, on Enda Kenny. He also delivers a very strong castigaton of the Greens.
He also reveals that having ruled out a Friday, the election mightn’t take place on a Thursday and that it will take place at the end of May (after the 23rd) at the very earliest.
In that vein of ordinariness, he takes on the chin the national pastime of poking fun when he garbles sentences. And true to form, he creates a brand new Bertie-ism when saying he doesn’t mind Bertie-isms.
“I have a good sense of humour. I have been doing Pub Grub and all of those programmes…”
(Of course, he meant to refer to Today FM’s ‘Gift Grub’)

Irish Examiner: How can you deny after the Ard Fheis that Fianna Fáil is not getting involved in auction politics?

Bertie Ahern: Our tax and spending proposals are costed. They are fully deliverable in a strong economy.
What we put out in the Ard Fheis is well within the limits of what we have been spending on welfare and tax in the last number of years.

IE: What’s your response to the charge of 53 promises and E300 million a minute during your speech?

BA: Enda Kenny made 23 promises (in his speech), my guys tell me, and nobody mentioned that, only that he made one…
While others have sought to claim it’s auction politics, the charge does not hold up to scrutiny.
I watch what happened in the AF. There was a group of people who said beforehand: They (FF) have no ideas. They have no routine. They have no innovation. If I made the speech and didn’t put in the things, they would have said: ‘I told you so. No ideas. No fresh ideas. Too long in Government.
And then when I came out with a whole lot of new thinking they couldn’t take that.

IE: Some say you were panicked into making the speech. Did you plan to make those promises?

BA: My draft speech, I had back in early to mid February.
The stuff that was in it was taken from our draft manifesto and I took out a few and put in a few as we go along but most of the big ones didn’t change a line.

IE: Is the election going to be fought on the broad theme of Bill Clinton’s famous line, ‘it’s the economy stupid’?

BA: There are two things in it to be honest. There’s the economy and all the economy means… Then the second issue is local issues. The local issues totally differ. As I toddle around the country (I encounter them). They can be big or small. In Cork at the moment it’s the airport. In Galway it’s the water. All around the country, there’s a national issue and then local.

IE: Look at what happened to Tony Blair in his third election in Britain. Will FF struggle to maintain its seat and if you win, will you just about limp home?

BA: Every election is different. I have fought so many of them in my career. We did very well in the last election and we will be fighting hard to hold on in most constituencies and in a couple of other constituencies trying to increase our representation.
What you have to do is just get out there and put in the best work you can, the best policy formulation. Do you plans. Do your publicity. Do all the things we are rolling out.
I have to laugh at the position. Two weeks ago, they said FF have no posters, are not doing up any leaflets, and I met a TD today and he said you have a huge amount of posters up, you have the (FF newspaper) out, you have ads everywhere, do you not think it’s too soon?
I think it’s about work. It’s about what’s the policy agenda, fulfilling that, finishing out our period of work, right up to the end of April and into early May, we still have a huge amount of launches. And I’m going to keep on doing that, on climate change, getting our position out. Ticking off our boxes on what we promised to do.
We have a lot of legislation we won’t get through but that we’re going to get published because at least we want to get the work finished on it.
It will be harder because you are ten years in (power). Tony Blair, in fairness to him, would have walked the last election if it wasn’t for Iraq. The one issue, the international thing that went wrong for them, in so far as they thought they were going to get in and get out.

IE: And what has been your Iraq?

BA: Health is probably the one that comes up and repeats itself.
There are good stories in health. The one good thing about the row over the maternity hospital in Cork is that everybody now knows there’s a world-class hospital in Cork. In Tullamore, they are opening up a huge hospital.
There’s no balance in this (debate). This is all about let’s find the story, let’s find where the crash is, let’s talk about the reaction.

IE: But Enda Kenny said he’d make the election a referendum on health?

BA: Looking at health, we met most of targets on staff and on beds.
Look at the cardiac strategies. They are completed. In 1997, the only cardiac was in the Mater. There’s cardiac in Galway and Cork now. It’s not a issue. There’s no waiting list for (cardiac) stents.
The cancer strategy is very good. It’s nice if it was finished (but work continues). Maternity is very strong.
We are spending more per capita on the capital programme than any other country in the OECD except Norway.
(He continues with a defence of co-location): The length of time (projects have taken) when we have given them money. There were
areas that we gave money in 1999 and they have not finished yet.
It’s Too slow. I’m not a great lover of the private sector but it’s quicker.

IE: You were described before as the Teflon Taoiseach, as Fianna Fail’s best electoral asset. Has the loan controversy of last autumn changed that?


BA: When I went in 1997, the view was that it would be impossible to beat the three amigos as they marched around town together, that I would be a lightweight and that I wouldn’t be able to beat them.
There were three experienced guys, Spring Bruton and de Rossa.
There was the fact that I came up on the outside track with our logo: ‘People before Politics’. It surprised people.
Commentators generally felt (the Rainbow) would win that election after two and a half years.
I think we caught them out and built on that in 2002, we had a very good election.
Nobody can deny the success of this Government but there are people… you built up battles with various groups. That’s inevitable when you are government.

IE: But what about your reputation?

BA: I don’t think about it too much. I would meet more people in two or three days around the country than most people would meet in a year.
You would very quickly detect if they had totally gone off you or not. And they are not.
I addressed public meetings last Friday or Saturday to probably 3-4,000 people which was bigger than the FG Ard Fheis and it was only my usual toddle around the country for a Sunday afternoon.
I won no election on my own. I didn’t win 1997 or 2002 on my own.
I don’t detect any personal animosity to me at all and I think the events of last October don’t rate. They are more interested in how I’ll solve the nurse’s dispute or how I’ll get rid of the crime.

IE: You have a reputation as a master strategist? Was the so-called Inchdoney Conversion (where he embraced socialism) an example of that following the poor local and European election results.

BA: Inchdoney was important. But the switch wasn’t that fundamental. (in 1997), we had gone in with policies to enhance education, services, get more people working, stimulate the economy and growth, bring down corporaton and personal tax, give more incentive to work.
It all us to put more into social policy. We have done a good job in these areas. Let’s put more money into education; let’s put more billions in health.Let’s advance some of the social agenda. I believe we have done that. You could not do that in advance, you could not have done that before you cut income tax and corporation tax.
You would never have had the money.

IE: Speaking of strategy, what Thursday will the election be held?

BA: I never said a Thursday.

IE: You have not decided what day of the week?

BA: I probably have. It’s of no importance whatsoever. My point about the Friday was that with the cleaning of he register, now people are meant to be registered where they are living. That includes students as well. If they are living in Dublin, they should be registered in Dublin
There are tens of people every Friday, working a four and a half day week, who are gone on Friday at lunchtime and do you think they are going to stop for an election?
The fact was that in 2002, they didn’t, they were gone. That’s even more so five years on.

IE: Do you get tired of the media and comedians going too far by parodying you?

BA: No. No. I have a good sense of humour. I have been doing ‘Pub Grub’ (sic) and all of those programmes, breakfast time, all of these programmes have been going on for years and different radio programmes.

IE: Where do you think the election will be won and lost in terms of constituencies. And will Sinn Fein get a lift from the northern breakthrough and the Greens from growing concern over climate change?

BA: At the end of the day, the election is 43 by-elections.
Maybe Sinn Fein will get a lift. I hope we have. I have worked as hard on the North as I could. I gave it the lion’s share of my time and my commitment. You just have to. There are some people who look at the North as the key issue. What percentage of the electorate they are I’m not sure.
People have a general interest but what will swing their vote is a ceist eile.
The Greens are benefiting not from anything the Greens in Ireland are doing and I’m not saying any of this being disrespectful against the Greens. But all over the world the Greens are taking a huge jump except in Germany where the Greens were in power and they got rid of them and they went through the floor.
All of the places where they have never had power, they are doing well.
That’s because you can’t turn on the TV without seeing an ad or seeing somebody going on abut a carbon footprint or a water footprint.
It’s been that way now relentlessly now since last summer and really since the year before when you had all the floods and the mudslides and everything else.
Of course people are rightfully concerned about these issues. We were working away on our recycling programme and the huge things we did on recycling a year ago and nobody would talk about them.
Now, we say something and people say you should have done more.

IE: Are you saying that thee Greens will get a bounce like Labour did in 1992?

BA: Not that big. They are getting a bounce. The premier of Newfoundland was here recently. The Greens were 2% of the vote six months ago and now they are on 11%. This is happening worldwide.
There is no analysis of their policies. I have not read one article.
There’s no analysis of what the Greens in this country stand for on anything.
The Government’s policies will be analysed to death. I’d say they are getting away with that in a lot of countries.
They were down there today (during Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil) sneering at our climate change policy. I was shown what they said three years ago. They hadn’t a good idea in the bloody document.
Then we put out a document. Our document isn’t made up. It’s what we have done, what we’re doing.
Ok, there’s no doubt about it (in relation to being 24% over the 1990 level of emissions). You say that’s not good enough. That’s fair comment. I have no problem with that.
These guys (the Green TDs) are down there just chipping way.
Do I believe that for a minute if these guys are in Government they would have an idea, you know what they would do, they would just take all of the ideas that FF come up with because most of the stuff we are doing in Government is stuff that FF scientists and guys have given us. We didn’t find this in the system I can tell you.

IE: You could end up being in Government with them? In any case, won’t it be far more complicated than in 2002?

BA: There could be any series of combinations. To answer your fair question, will the Greens do better, or will they be more significant, it’s obvious the answer is, yes.

INSIDE POLITICS - KENNY GETS CANNY

It’s now almost five years since Enda Kenny became leader of Fine Gael. So stunning was his rise without trace that most people outside the tight-knit world of politics were moved to ask: Enda who?

Kenny became Fine Gael leader at the lowest moment in (almost) the longest losing
streak in modern political history. The backroom people in Fine Gael surveying the train wreck of 2002 knew that, if the party lost again in 2007, the record would read: five successive leaders failed in five successive elections over 20 years.

When Kenny became leader, one of those strategists Frank Flannery wrote a position paper setting out a recovery plan. His key message on Kenny was that they shouldn’t expect a Wedding at Cana miracle – they needed show patience and give Kenny time to develop a persona and authority as a credible leader.

I spent some of the weekend looking over Kenny’s previous Ard Fheis speeches; some more impressive than others. One of the recurring broad themes was that he was not yet the finished article; and still a work in progress. Kenny’s favourite analogy was the GAA and his riff was that the championship hadn’t started yet.

Well. Let’s start from beginning. There is no patience. There is no waiting. The time has now arrived. The moment for judging Kenny’s leadership aura is now. No more work in progress. No more unfinished article. And the championship? Well, we’re approaching the knockout stages.

And cometh the hour cometh the man. Kenny’s leadership address was the strongest, most cogent, most coherent, most mature and most powerful that has been delivered by any leader of any party since the 2002 election.

Seven days beforehand Bertie Ahern had stood on the same stage in the same hall to deliver 30 minutes of non-stop giveaway in a showbiz razzamatazz spectacular.
Kenny’s speech was an exercise of studied contrast. He was conscious of this – conscious that he was plotting a radically different course.

"Last week, another man stood in this hall and made 53 promises," he told the crowded auditorium at City West.

Kenny instead offered only one; that he would not seek re-election as Taoiseach in 2012 if he did not deliver what he promised.

Of course, that wasn’t the only promise. It was the only new promise. In a couple of weeks, the party’s will all publish their manifestos and reveal what we all already know. In Fine Gael’s case, we know just about everything about their policies on crime (as cynically ‘tough’ as all the others); on health (no private hospitals on public land, 2,300 more beds and free GP visits for under fives); and on finances (a E450m stamp duty, tax cuts and incentives for stay-home parents).

But the tenor and tone of Kenny’s address was one of two big calculated gambles the party took this weekend.

The first was its decision to make this election a referendum on health services. The Labour Party in Britain tried that when trying to take on Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and bellyflopped embarrassingly. Fianna Fail did somewhat better when it became the linchpin of their successful 1987 campaign.

It’s still a punt. And when Fianna Fail and the PDs take out the pestle and mortar with the intention of crushing the Mullingar Accord to a pulp, Kenny and Pat Rabbitte will need to convince the electorate that they can be trusted to manage the economy
The second gamble was Kenny’s approach. This was no promise-fest. This was a leader selling himself as honest, trustworthy, a man who would live up to his promises by his deeds. To do that, he made the speech more personal, more exposed, more confessional than any other. In the process, his grandfather, his father, his wife, his children all came powerfully in to the mix.

And to that end, this was the key passage in his speech. "I believe it’s about time a politician stepped up to the line and took responsibility for their actions in government. I am that politician."

I am that politician. It was Enda Kenny saying: I am the finished article. I am a work that is complete. Leave aside your doubts, your reservations, your qualifications. With me you will get honesty, integrity, no litany of broken promises. I am the man for the job.

Within minutes, Brian Lenihan of FF was on to complain about the lack of specifics, the reliance on rhetoric. But he was missing the point. Kenny wasn’t selling policies. He was selling Enda Kenny. For Fine Gael to upset what Bertie describes as the apple tart, it needs to convince them that Kenny can step up to plate. And this arguably, was the moment he did it.

The Contract for a Better Ireland will have a resonance. In a cleverly constructed passage, he set out a long list of failings and alleged failings of this coalition, described (in very simple and broad terms) his vision of what could be achieved. Leaders’ speeches are becoming more like Ernest Hemingway short stories with the repetition of key words and phrases. Last week it was ‘steps to a better Ireland’. With Kenny it was ‘The Contract for a Better Ireland’ and ‘bond’ and promise.

"If you have given me, that most precious and most powerful thing a democrat has, your vote, then I have a moral duty, a democratic duty, a patriotic duty, to live up to my end of the contract. I belive it’s vital that you know just how serious I am. Just how serious this is."

That heady stuff could have left him exposed, especially the passage about his maternal grandfather, James McGinley a Mayo lighthouse keeper.

Did he pull it off? I think so. Kenny has travelled a long road in five years. His reach will never be that of Bertie’s amazing technicolour anorak but he has scored higher on other counts. The Fianna Fail promise-fest last weekend and BertieGate may come back to haunt the party like decentralisation, electronic voting and the latent dishonesty of its ‘no-cuts’ promises in 2002.

The polls show Kenny lagging behind Ahern in terms of popularity and ability but ahead in terms of honesty and integrity. Fine Gael will hope to capitalise on those, hope that the electorate will be swayed by arguments on governance rather than on more promises.

And Kenny’s championship? Well, the way things are panning out, it could be victory by the back door. Fine Gael has clipped its wings a bit in terms of ambition. It’s target seat gain is realistically around the 20 mark – where once it was 30 – means it will rely heavily on a solid Labour performance and a surge for the Greens (with perhaps a few independents thrown in).

There was a perception that Fine Gael had flat-lined since last September. My own instinct is that they’re back in the game. The whole picture is so fragmented now that it increasingly looks that the coalition that emerges later this summer (whether led by FF or FG) will be the most complicated configuration since 1948).

This is my analysis piece from this morning's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - THE OTHER SPEECH

Enda Kenny's speech to the Fine Gael Ard Fheis last night was in marked contrast to the gameshow extravaganza Bertie Ahern gave us last week. It was, most of my political colleagues agreed, the best speech of the conference cycle and probably the best of the past couple of years. There was a studied effort to make it as different as possible to that of Ahern the previous weekend - and it played to all of Kenny's strengths - the perception that he is honest; his personable nature; his ordinary man perception. Much more on this tomorrow...

Meanwhile, the controversy over Ahern's speech rumbles on this morning. Stephen O'Brien in the Sunday Times has a very interesting main lead implying that Brian Cowen, the FF deputy leader, was kept in the dark about it until very late, and the Sunday Independent also lead on it. Stephen Collins column in The Irish Times (subscription) was also excellent. My colleague Paul O'Brien and I both led on the same story last Monday (click here for Irish Examiner story).

The upshot is somebody is either that somebody is telling porkey pies or that some of the most senior ministers are excluded from the deliberations of the cabal of advisers that surrounds Ahern (suggesting that he now has the equivalent of Tony Blair's sofa Government). So who should we believe? Those who tell us that it was planned all along (and I had two separate briefings on Friday to this effect) or those who say that there was a panicky about-turn by Ahern in the run up to the Ard Fheis?

Fianna Fail has made a habit of this. We should call it the hyperventilating stunt. They did it with decentralisation, with electronic voting, with the rash promises of no-cuts made before the 2002 election.

Given the adverse media coverage this weekend, is this another of the stunts that's going to backfire?

INSIDE POLITICS - PROMISES, PROMISES

This árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver, Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton said on Thursday.

Where did we hear that line before?

Oh, yes, here in fact. In this column last week we quoted Seamus Brennan saying that Fianna Fáil’s árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver.

We all know what happened after that. We found ourselves caught in a monsoon. It might have lasted only half an hour, but it left the political establishment wholly swamped.

This column, for one, was suckered last week. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to admit that it included this ultra confident prediction: “Unlike other party conferences held so far this season, I don’t anticipate any major announcement on tax cuts, on stamp duty, on tax bands, or on anything that’s going to cost a ball of cash down the line.”

How wrong can you be? Very wrong in my case, though, in fairness, I wasn’t alone in being duped.

So when Fine Gael start telling us that they’re not going to make any promises they can’t deliver, forgive us as we laugh hysterically while quickly finding a spare patch of sand to bury our heads in.

In fairness, you can be sure that Fine Gael won’t be making any major tax announcements for the simple reason that they have already made all their major tax announcements already.

The first part of it was the 2% cut in the standard rate, the Labour part of the deal. Fine Gael’s own portion is the proposed cuts in stamp duty Enda Kenny announced on a slow Thursday during a visit to Rathkeale.

That begged a number of questions. Why then? Why not wait until the árd fheis where you can get maximum impact for expensive — yet definitely populist — concessions on stamp duty?

Part of the answer to this became evident last night during Kenny’s opening speech to the conference and his key line that “the General Election this year will be a referendum on this Government’s handling of the health services”.

That is what you’d call a “raise on the blind” in poker parlance. It is by any measure a massive gamble, saying that the election will turn on health rather than on the economy without fully knowing if those cards will be revealed.

Sure, health is always a core issue. But will a party’s policies on health be more swayable for a majority of voters than its economic and financial policies? It’s a big call. But it has been made: you can see this calculation playing through in the themes that the party has chosen for this morning’s live TV coverage of debates — crime and health.

And yes, like Seamus Brennan a week earlier, Richard Bruton insisted this week that this árd fheis will not be a manifesto launch.

But given that the party will have an almost unfettered chance to push its agendas and candidates this weekend, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t a couple of major announcement.

But the difference will be that big surprises will be in the areas of health and crime rather in tax, stamp duty or other wallet-fatteners.

Seamus Brennan worried about promises the opposition made and their potential to bankrupt the country. I don’t think (here I go again; a fool never learns) anything Fine Gael will promise this weekend will bankrupt the country financially.

But there are other ways of bankrupting a country. At present, the Oireachtas is debating a draconian piece of legislation proposing tough mandatory sentences, erosions to the right of silence, seven-day detention, restrictive bail laws including electronic monitoring. In the dying days of this government, it has been rushed through quicker than a Bertie Ahern árd fheis promise.

The problem is that there’s no opposition to it from the big parties. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (and to a lesser extent Labour) do their Big Bad Wolf impressions huffing and puffing at each other to see who’s toughest. And the perverse creation and ratcheting-up of a crime crisis that simply doesn’t exist has led to the most cynical auction of all.

At last year’s árd fheis, Enda Kenny promised drunk tanks, among other hardchaw policies. That was scary. I’m worried he’ll go too far this year, establish Fine Gael’s law and order credentials by suggesting something even crazier than the Government’s crazy policies; and end up overbidding at an auction that can leave us
all bankrupt when it comes to justice, proportionality and morality.

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner.
Read Enda Kenny's opening address to the FG Ard Fheis here

INSIDE - TOON TOWN

Timing is everything. You wonder why the PDs chose today to launch their, ahem, humorous (I'm laughing so much that my sides are hurting) website rainbowsplits.ie.

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Fine Gael Ard Fheis that's starting out in City West tonight, could it?

Or the fact that FF is gearing up to choose today as the day when it begins a detailed rebuttal of Frank Flannery's 30-seat-gain prediction? Coincidence, sheer coincidence, I tell you!

I was thrilled this morning to find out about the PD site. Great, I though. At last they are injecting a bit of humour into the campaign. Sadly, though, when you get through the feeble humour-lite front page, it's the usual over-the-top mixture of rant and scare stories. Is anybody else getting tired about being warned of the dark dangers inherent in two middle-of-the-road centrist parties like FG and Labour oining up together. Isn't there a bigger ideological divide between the PDs and FF nowadays, especially since Comrade Bertie wrapped the red flag around him?

It's worth reading though. Follow the above link but don't expect too many belly laughs.

INSIDE POLITICS - POLITICIAN OF THE YEAR

You know how to get a story out?

Just tell a politician a secret.

The worst kept secret of the last 24 hours was revealed tonight when Trevor Sargent was named as the Magill Politician of the Year. I was one of about a dozen political correspondents who used our skill, expertise, deeply-held prejudices and a thumb-tack to choose the winners.

The event was held in the Royal College of Physicians just two doors down from Leinster House and there was a great turnout despite the fact that the division bells for crucial votes had been ringing all day.

Sargent completed what was a bit of a 'Scorsese on Oscar Night' for the Greens.

Eamon Ryan - who was very bashful and self-deprecating - won TD of the Year and Mayor of Galway Niall O Brolchain was a nominee in the 'one to watch' category.

What struck me is that the politicians who won awards were genuinely chuffed and pleased, including a beaming Joan Burton who won campaigner of the year ("I didn't make a speech," she joked afterwards, "because I would have cried like Gwyneth Paltrow's at the Oscars."). Noel Dempsey was also very pleased. I suppose that in such an insecure profession, it is nice to get validation (though it's not the same as getting elected).

Sargent quoted an old political maxim that when the party's doing badly, it's the leader who's at fault and when the party's doing well, the leader gets all the credit.

It is true that his party is doing well. But I think that its support might have plateaued and that it might experience the recoil that a Sinn Fein bounce will bring it. Still, sure, the Greens will do very well. I'm still predicting 10 seats or more. But I think that if things go smoothly for SF between now and May 8 they will also be winning that amount - and will be in competition with the Greens for at least one - Dublin Central.

It was great to see Terry O'Brien getting the 'one to watch' award. Terry is a rising star in the Labour Party and his attitude is just amazing. However, popular and all as he is in Tralee, the town support won't be enough to win him a seat in a constituency that makes the Titanic look like a currach.

And while the ever-pleasant, ultra-capable Oonagh McPhillips from the Dept of Justice also deserved her award, it was great to see her boss Michael McDowell bravely come along to accept his gaffe of the year award for his Richard Bruton-Goebbels outburst.

His speech was hilarious. His best line was that he was entitled to gaffe because in the PDs he is the gaffer!

INSIDE POLITICS - FIANNA FAIL ARD FHEIS

In the knowledge it’s a little vulgar for first thing Monday morning, we still couldn’t resist distorting the famous Mae West line to describe the amazing conversion that happened Fianna Fail this weekend:“Is that a gavel in your pocket and are you just happy to see me?”


For having spent many weeks slating the opposition for getting involved in irresponsible ‘auction politics’ and out-vying each other on tax cuts, Fianna Fail this week decided that the best way of beating them was to get in on the act.

Drawing to the close of a humdrum Ard Fheis in City West this weekend– with the exception of Brian Cowen’s majestic demolition of Fine Gael’s tax proposals – Bertie
Ahern stood up on the podium on Saturday night and electrified the weekend with an unusual – nay, extraordinary – leader’s speech.

It was a baffling kind of affair, going against the grain of everything we had been expecting all week. On Tuesday, Social Affairs Minister Seamus Brennan had launched the ‘clár’ for the Ard Fheis and also took the opportunity to flay the opposition with some hard ‘timber’ for their irresponsible spending policies.

“Fine Gael and Labour have been making commitments now for over two years in the Dail and in policy documents. They add up to a frightening amount of money. It’s not a competition we are interested in entering,” he proclaimed.

Well within four days the Fianna Fail star players had entered the fray. And in 30 minutes, Bertie Ahern had managed the amazing feat of making more new promises and commitment than the combined opposition had made in two years.

There were some pundits (including this one) who were made to look foolish by Ahern’s speech, having confidently predicted that there would be nothing new or substantial in his speech in terms of promises. Ministers would consistently tell you that they would continue in Government mode (ie running the country) for as long as possible and that the party’s policies and manifesto would appear only after Easter. Until yesterday morning, when ministers started dropping big hints into their own speeches, there was no general inkling that it was going to take place.

So what happened? Had we been given a bum steer? Had those clever backroom wonks in Fianna Fail managed to keep it all strictly confidential to be gloriously revealed by Ahern on Saturday night?

Erm, no. The first hint was on Saturday evening. Usually, the script of the leader’s speech is released under embargo in late afternoon to allow TV, radio and Sunday newspapers to absorb it. But for once, the script was late, not arriving until after 6pm. This suggested that late amendments had been added.

And later that night a member of the Cabinet told me that none of the proposals to cut rates of tax and PRSI were in the original speech. Yes, the Minister said, there were a couple of sweeteners in the speech. But the decision to include the kitchen sink and all was taken at a very very late stage.

And the reason for that? Nerves verging on panic. Ahern himself had always spoken about Easter as being the natural starting point for the campaign. But what he read on Saturday night was, to all intents and purposes, the party’s manifesto masquerading as a leader’s speech.

The decision to shunt everything forward, according to the senior minister, was made on the back of two opinion polls that spelt bad news for Fianna Fail this week.

The first in the Star on Thursday showed the party at 32% in Dublin, support levels that would invariably lead to the party losing seats. And then yesterday, the Sunday Business Post’s latest monthly tracking poll showed marginal slippage for FF for the second successive month. Given that the party’s support levels were consistently in the 40s in the run-up to the 2002 election, this gave Ahern some cause for concern.

Hence, the front-loading of all its best goodies and the decision to start now, not at Easter. And in his interview with RTE Radio’s ‘This Week’ yesterday Ahern gave credence to this when accepting that his party were lagging behind the others.

“When you are in government for a decade, it’s just that bit harder. The polls are very interesting if you look back over the past 15 months.

“There has been a swing of about four times of us being up five and being back down five. I accept that we are down in the opinion polls even though there are on a small basis.”

Well, there are two reactions to panic – fight or flight.

And certainly Ahern’s instincts on Saturday were all fight. His leader’s address was the best he has made in a couple of years, helped by the fact that he was talking in simple language about tangible things and not about concepts.

Promises came faster than bids at a charity auction. No sooner had Ahern hit the gavel on a new promise, than another one had materialised. The policies seemed to poach bits out of other party policies with a couple of novel ideas of FF’s own making. The elimination of the ceiling on PRSI will be popular as will the halving of rates, and the dropping of tax rates

It was getting harder to keep up with the pace of Bertie’s speech, as the promises stacked up. Increasing tax bands; rises tax credits in line with wage inflation; the State pension to be increased from E200 to E300 over five years; outflanking Fine Gael on tough cop stuff with promises of mandatory jail terms for unprovoked assaults, CCTV cameras everywhere and compulsory drugs tests in prisons. More cops. Step-down beds. More teachers. Cafes for teenagers. It went on and on.

But when you start looking at how much all this is going to cost, Fianna Fail’s earlier claims of auction politics begins to look very hollow indeed. After the speech, senior ministers argued that these promises weren’t part of the auction because they were all costed and affordable.

But then all of the other parties have done the same exercise. And I think, strategically, that Fianna Fail has realised very late in the day that it blundered by ignoring massive the E8 billion surplus warchest in the Government Exchequer.
All the other parties saw that dropping ball and caught it before it bounced. Thus, they were able to offer wallet-fattening incentives without being accused of spending beyond their means.

The upshot of it all is that the gloves are now off. Fianna Fail also unveiled its first poster yesterday, a sure sign that the bidding war is on. It might not have been called yet but the election campaign is now in full flight.

This is my analysis from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE: ALL SCHLOCK, NO HORROR

THE way Fianna Fáil plays it is always pure Hollywood.


The body count is always high. Our heroes will have survived more scrapes than Indiana Jones and 007 combined. But somehow — despite all the odds — they emerge triumphant at the end.

It’s not that Fianna Fáil hasn’t shipped damage as the plot of this election has thickened. It has. Where do you begin? Decentralisation; electronic voting; BertieGate and debts of honour; nursing home charges; the sly cuts after the 2002 election; the CC case and statutory rape controversy; Eddie Hobbs and ‘Rip-Off Republic’; the Ivor Callely and Seán Haughey mess; the shifting mists that were Bertie Ahern’s views on Charlie Haughey; and, come to think of it, on everything else! And then there were the minor sub-plots: the exiling of Beverly Flynn and the utterly anonymous Michael Collins.

But the party clearly calculates that none of these — individually or collectively — will be enough to swerve it off course. The party felt emboldened enough earlier this week that the election will be fought on just one issue. And what is that? The Big E. No, not the environment, sadly. It’s the economy stupid.

Séamus Brennan set the tone when he began Fianna Fáil’s first bit of ‘pre-taliation’ by accusing the opposition of spendthrift flagrancy in their policies so far. These would end up costing billions and could bankrupt the country, claimed Brennan in his most sincere ‘I’m not messing now’ voice.

Of course, the corollary to that is that Fianna Fáil has kept its powder dry so far and is sure to announce its own lucky bag of goodies (of course, also costing billions) closer to the election.

Of course, the 71st Ard Fheis this weekend is an election one. But what’s interesting when you flick through the clár and observe the confident body language of ministers is this: they believe that the Big E will bring them home in 2007, as it did in 2002.

There will be no death by a thousand cuts this time. Yes, all those issues will be a factor. Some will hurt electorally. And, of course, the health and crime crises are biggies and could inflict potentially massive holes below the waterline.

But the net conclusion is that none is big enough to down FF completely. The party is like an SSIA account holder who has gone down the equity route. With only one month left it is hoping that no sharp shocks or corrections happen on stock markets that could put it all in jeopardy.

In the world of politics that means an A&E disaster; a CC case or Fr Brendan Smyth-type scandal; or an announcement from one of the huge technology companies that its ditching us for Timbuktu or Bora Bora.

And having done the political calculus, the Taoiseach and his closest aides have come to the conclusion that the economy out-trumps them all. The thinking goes: ‘The only thing that has made all these things possible — from roads to health to childcare — has been a thriving economy. And the only party that can guarantee the Big E is FF.’

Look at the slogan. “Leading Ireland Forward“. It could as easily be, More of the Same, or, Five More Years.

Listen to what Brennan had to say this week about this: “The task ahead in the future is to keep that going, not to put it at risk and to protect that economic development.”

Expect Ahern to expand on that in his presidential address tonight. Unlike other party conferences held so far this season, I don’t anticipate any major announcement on tax cuts, on stamp duty, on tax bands, or on anything that’s going to cost a ball of cash down the line. Not this weekend, maybe later (though there will be a couple of news lines to feed us ever-hungry news hounds).

The purpose this weekend will, therefore, be to rally the troops, for Ministers to bask in the glory of their mini fiefdoms, and an effort to portray a Government on top of its game.

Bertie Ahern is the poorest public speaker of them all, though Trevor Sargent gave him a good run for his money at the Green Ard Fheis last month. But that doesn’t matter. Bertie is still his party’s biggest asset. His worth to the party lies beyond oratory, in that ethereal quality that can be described only as Bertiality. And its effect has not worn off enough to prevent his face from adorning a lamp-post near you.

Yep, in true Hollywood tradition, what Fianna Fáil is really planning is ‘2002: The Sequel.’

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

Click Here!

By the way, this is Bertie Ahern's opening address to the conference last night. He majored on the environment - it's definitely get scared of the Greens time!

INSIDE POLITICS - DUBLIN POLL

We are going to have more opinion polls than Spring showers between now and polling days. The latest one is this morning's from The Star (commissioned from Lansdowne, which conducts our Examiner polls).

The poll was confined to Dublin and had a sample of 500 people across the 12 constituencies (I'd reckon the margin of error is, therefore, in the order of plus or minus four).

Still, like all opinion polls (crude instrument, snapshot etc that they are) the findings are fascinating. Fianna Fail has taken a bit of a hit (down five points to 32 since the 2002 elections) and Fine Gael seems to have staged a bit of a comeback that could see its miserly return of three seats in Dublin rise (but not as much as the party hopes).

Of late, the story du jour has been the rise of the Greens (and you read it here first, a long long time ago). And it is no different here. Five points up. At a heady 13 points only one point behind Labour. That's going to reap a seats bonanza (suddenly Patricia McKenna and Tony McDermott are looking very very good; and you never know, David Healy might be looking like he could squeeze past Larry O'Toole in Dublin North East).

And Sinn Féin? Hard to say. The party will gain, but may only have one extra seat in Dublin when the votes are cast.

A warning though. The findings (bar the FF fall and the Greens gain) are all within the margin of error. And from a stats perspective, there has been little change since then...

INSIDE POLITICS - WAVING OR DROWNING (SHAMROCKS)?

Being St Patrick’s weekend, the Cabinet are away doing (delete where applicable) thankless drudge work/damn all; working to exhaustive schedules/lounging beside a pool; and drowning the shamrock/drowning the shamrock.

They may deprive the population of admiring their extremely tight-fitting but fabulous flesh-coloured outfits on parade stands all over the country today.

But one thing is guarantedd, they won’t be slouching when they come back knowing their collective and individual futures are on the line.

People are still in the thinking mode that goes: The election will happen towards the end of May and isn’t that a full two months away?

But the reality is that the 29th Dáil is down to its last 11 or 12 days and counting. So, when it comes to proposed Bills, unless the guillotine is applied with the abandon of France 1789, most of the priority legislation is going to disappear down the plughole.

For over the next couple of days, Government chief whip Tom Kitt will be marshalling his colleagues like a RyanAir check-in attendant. Hand-baggage only. No heavy stuff. No frills. Only stuff you can carry on board. You need to travel light from here on in.

So a lot of the worthy and useful stuff will be chucked out for the expedient reason that they don’t win elections. And only the real essentials will remain.

And of course, they will all revolve around the big three issues that will win or lose this election – Iraq, questions surrounding Bertie Ahern’s governance, and Eamon O Cuiv’s handling of the Dingle controversy. Ok, a little joke there. Predictably, the star issues are economy, crime, and health.

That’s why a doorstep of a new Criminal Justice Bill (CJB) was published on Thursday, less than a year after another massive CJB became law. The phrase ‘rush to judgement’ doesn’t do justice to the haste with which it came. It’s a runaway train. New mandatory minimum sentences. New electronic monitoring. A radical erosion of the right to silence. And sorry for being so crude, but it will become law quicker than fresh dung sliding off a shovel.

And that’s why too the Government is so keen to resolve the row with consultants by the end of March – to proclaim that, yes, folks, we have turned around that elusive corner on health.

You look at McDowell’s spontaneous combustion act for a not strictly necessary CJB and compare it with the perfectly still surface of that backwater known as mental health policy.

In January 2006, the Government published a report called a Vision for Change. It presented the findings of an expert group on mental health policy. Well-researched, well-argued, nobody demurred from its own recommendation that ‘A Vision for Change should be “accepted and implemented as a complete plan.”

When it was published groups like Mental Health Ireland said it gave the “country a second, and possibly last, chance to develop balanced and integrated modern mental health services.”

A second chance? Yes. There was an earlier document called Planning for the Future. That was published in 1984. It took 22 years for successive governments to fail to fully implement that one. Last year’s plan is already showing early signs of the slippage that doomed the 1984 plan. And that’s why the groups are getting so nervous and concerned.

Their problem is that, electorally, they are nowhere. They campaign in huge and complex areas. But unfortunately they affect a minority and, ergo, don’t sufficiently influence electoral outcomes.

In fairness to the Government, there has been progress. But it has been halting and limited, and not helped by the off-the-wall comments we occasionally get from the junior minister in charge Tim O’Maley.

Sure, the number of people with ID placed inappropriately in mental hospitals has gradually fallen to about 250. But where are they going? According to Inclusion Ireland, hundreds have ended up transferred from inappropriate mental hospitals to even more inappropriate nursing homes where inspections are geared towards standard of accommodation, not towards activation, quality of life, or development of potential.

There is O’Malley’s plan to sell 10 old mental hospitals to raise new funds. When is that is going to happen? In two years? In five years? A decade? The C&AG identified one home with 250 residents where “a custodial culture had developed largely due to constrained resources”. That was shocking. These are the most vulnerable people of all in our society.

As Dr John Owen, chairman, of the Mental Health Commission referred in its 2005 report to the severely mentally ill.

“These people still make up the majority of inpatients and while many have been
discharged to alternative community residences this has often been an exercise in relocation, serving the priority of closing mental hospitals rather than a
treatment and rehabilitation exercise in its own right.”

Sad. More sadly, there has been no rush from our political masters – or indeed from ourselves in wider society - to right this appalling situation.

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - PIER INTO THE FUTURE

A pier is a disappointed bridge, James Joyce once wrote. We’ve seen a lot of disappointed bridges in the past 10 years since the Good Friday Agreement was hailed as having signed, sealed and delivered a future for the North.

Driving on the literary rut for another couple of seconds, we come to Cré na Cille, the majestic novel written by the great Connemara writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain. All of its main characters are dead and are buried in the local graveyard beside the sea. All have carried the petty jealousies, snobberies, prejudices, gossip and tittle-tattle of their lives to the grave, where the sniping continues ad infinitum.

Yesterday we crossed that kind of divide or Rubicon.


And as the results trickled in, we got the accompanying flood of negativity and bickering. Paisley’s bellicose remarks about republicanism, democracy and evil set the tone. Soon doubts were being expressed about the March 26 deadline. The media honed in on other problems. How could Sinn Fein say it was committed to policing and then parlay its way out of its own MP Michelle Gildernew’s comments? (She said she would refuse to contact the PSNI about suspicious dissident republican activity.)
Beyond that, there was the more universal brand of pessimism. The DUP and Sinn Fein had almost wholly emasculated the more moderate SDLP and the Ulster Unionists. Extremism had won out. Tribalism had triumphed. This wasn’t power-sharing. It was cantonisation. It was Balkanisation. Another false dawn.

All those disappointed bridges. The IRA ceasefire in 1994; the Good Friday Agreement; the Weston Park agreement in 2001; Hillsborough in November 2003; The IRA declaration that it was standing down in July 2005; decommissioning that winter: the St Andrews Agreement of last October; Assembly elections; and March 26.

To be sure it was sad to see the SDLP slip down to just 16 seats and have to face the reality of having only one ministry. It wasn't nice to see moderate unionism outflanked, outmanoeuvred and outplayed by the DUP.

I have likened Sinn Féin before to the cuckoo who laid its egg in the SDLP nest. Or as a senior SDLP figure put it this week, SF has stolen the SDLP’s clothes, ill-fitting as they are. And on the other side, the same can be said for the DUP’s stealthy moderation over the past five years.

But there’s another version of history that could be inferred from this week’s events. The DUP and SF were both given thumping mandates. And strangely enough, the mandates were very much pro-devolution, pro-powersharing.

This was clearly demonstrated by the routing of the splinter republican and loyalist parties. The former SF activists who opposed its decision on policing got salamandered at the polls. The handful of other DUP naysayers got trounced – including Paul Berry in Newry-South Armagh. The UK Unionist Party leader Robert McCartney saw his seat disappear and his party reduced to an empty husk.

One of the great paradoxes of this election was that the candidate who actually took Bob McCartney’s seat was Brian Wilson, winning the Green Party its first seat in the Assembly. That was a crucial breakthrough.

This was a small sign of hope, of a society keen to move on, to make a painful transition, to move from crisis to normality, from vetoism to democracy. It was shown too in the relatively stable showing of the SDLP (admittedly with slippage) and by the strong showing of the Alliance Party. They just scraped their six seats in 2003 but comfortably retained and consolidated this time around.

From parsing the results you got a sense that the main political parties are lagging behind their electorate, that they has not quite copped on to the sense of impatience there is for change. There were a couple of neat illustrations of that.

For one, there was the election of the first Assembly member from an ethnic background. Alliance MLA Anna Lo, who took a seat in South Belfast, was born in Hong Kong.

And then there was the eyebrow-raising (if slightly unscientific) text poll run by Stephen Nolan on his show on BBC radio. Some 83% of respondents wanted the principal parties to enter government, without further negotiation. That bears repeating. Without further negotiation.

Of course, the DUP being the DUP, they will do things at their own pace. And that may mean further negotiation, lots of it. At the same time, while the Reverend roared as of old, other figures of the party were making more mollifying sounds. Jeffrey Donaldson volunteered the observation on Morning Ireland yesterday that perhaps Michelle Gildernew had been ‘off message’ in her comments on dissident republicans. Nigel Dodds was also clarifying and softening his ‘not in my lifetime’ stance, saying it related solely to the appointment of a SF justice minister, not to sharing power with republicans.

Granted the DUP will not be rushing to sign their names to devolved government immediately. We are still standing on a pier. But we are so close to the other side that already it’s beginning to feel like a bridge.


This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - Posters

The Kylie moment. Back in 2002, Pat Rabbitte, then a humble backbencher (that's an oxymoron if ever there was one) came out with a rapier comment that was never surpassed during the election campaign.

It was March, early April maybe - certainly a good few weeks before the election campaign was launched. And quicker than the Black Death had spread throughout Europe in the middle ages, Bertie posters had suddenly appeared on every lamp-post in the country.

Rabbitte couldn't avoid them in his Tallaght and Clondalkin heartland. Bertie's face was more ubiquitous in his constituency, he said, than Kylie Minogue's bum. (The Australian icon allegedly had surgery on her backside that - predictably - prompted oodles of pictorial coverage in the tabloid press).

The net point that Rabbitte was making was a serious one: under the electoral acts, there were strict limits on spending by candidates and parties.

In 2002, the limits for each candidate was:

- €25,394.76 (£20,000) in a 3 seat constituency;
- €31,743.45 (£25,000) in a 4 seat constituency;
- €38,092.14 (£30,000) in a 5 seat constituency.

During an election campaign, political parties are allowed, well, a great big zero to begin . The only income they are allowed iswhatever money is assigned by its individual candidates. So for example, a candidate in a 3 seat constituency was allowed 25 grand or so in 2002. The party allowed him or her to keep, say, €15,000 for personal campaign spending with the balance of €10 grand going to the party nationally. With 100 candidates, say, the party could then have an allowance of €1 million.

Not a lot of dough, when you are talking about TV and newspaper ads, leaders' travel expenses, daily launches etc.... all closely monitored by the Standards in Public Office Commission.

But the trick is that these limits only apply DURING the election campaigns (which last barely three weeks).

There are absolutely no limits on spending before the election campaign. That will give an answer as to why Fine Gael have launched a rake of billboards; why the Labour Party has followed suit and the PDs will launch their fourth in a series of five next Sunday when they launch a Health one.



Fine Gael's spend has been incredible, certainly running into seven figures. So far, FF has been the only party to hold back. Expect a blitzkrieg, a tidal wave, an epidemic, a blizzard, a plague of FF stuff from late March/early April.

We have the appearance of ethics and standards in spending and donations since the great unpleasantness of the middle 1990s. But in reality, there is little of it. What we do have is a total swiz, a magician's distraction.

For one, parties can spend as much as they like at any time other than those narrow three weeks of an election campaign.

And for two, what's worse is we don't have a clue how much they raise, despite the introduction of all these laws of transparency.

Sure, you have to declare a donation if it's above a certain limit. What parties have done is made sure that the vast bulk of their individual and corporate donations fall below that limit. So we hear about silent collections and envelopes at Fine Gael and FF shindigs - presidential dinners, Galway Races and the like. But when you see if there's any record of how much has been raised, there is nothing - because all the donations fall tantalisingly below the limit. It's the same with Bertie's Christmas fundraiser in Clontarf castle - it raises a huge amount of money for his well-greased organisation. But how much? The figure remains as much a mystery to the general public as Paddy the Plasterer.

Soon Bertie's face will start to appear everywhere. And for a couple of weeks the country will look like a tinpot former Soviet dictatorship as we succumb to the cult of personality surrounding the one and only The Bert.

By the way, The Bert's legend has spread far and wide - to Canada no less. Check out this comedy sketch:

INSIDE POLITICS - THAT Trevor speech

We all have had a couple of days to reflect on Trevor Sargent's unforgettable speech to his Ard Fheis in Galway.

Sadly, tragically, it just doesn't get any better with the passage of time.

The script was passable, though with far too much name-checking of candidates.

The sentiments were fine, laudable even when he started talking about children at the end.

But the delivery. Jesus Mary and Joseph.

What could you compare it with? Mayo in last year's All Ireland? Ireland's dismal victory over San Marino? Worse if anything. Britney shaving her hair off? That bad.

Sargent bounded onto stage like a tele evangelist. With his arms aloft and booming voice it looked like he could maintain the illusion, perhaps even perform a miracle along the way.

But after that it was downhill for most of the way. There were bits of random roaring followed by bits of speed-whispering, like a racing commentator who has lost his voice. The effect was disconcerting and a little weird.

He rallied a little towards the end. But compared to his strong and even performance in Cork last year, this was not his finest half hour, his delivery being weak and ropey.

When I asked one of his colleagues later, he said that it was probably a mixture of nerves and too much adrenaline and an uncertainty over the timing.


The thing is, however, that it won't make much difference ultimately. Speech-making in Ireland doesn't have the power it has in the US or, arguably, in Britain.

Sure Pat Rabbitte had a great speech this year - it was rightly lauded. But in the normal course of events, a leader does very well if he or she gets through their half hour without fluffing their lines or gaffing or swallowing their glottises.

Bertie Ahern is a poor speaker. His leader's address can be purgatory to listen to. He sometimes sounds like a man who is slowly choking to death. And he is never helped by the script that isn't suited to his style of delivery.

Enda Kenny can be surprisingly good - Kenny's big problem is when he doesn't have a script, or hasn't been fully briefed, and needs to think on his feet.

Gerry Adams is good, though he has an annoying habit of sometimes being ultra patronising, sometimes being cloying sentimental.

Mary Harney never used an auto-cue; she learned her speeches de ghlan-mheabhair - like an actor remembering her lines. That added an edge to her speechifying, made them interesting, unpredictable. Michael McDowell - for all his panache as an orator - delivered a pedestrian first speech as leader this year.

Albert Reynolds was not great either, though his folksiness got him through those long half hours. John Bruton wasn't bad, except for the time Twink spoiled the national conference. Haughey wasn't the Mae West - his nasalised drone couldn't sustain a half hour or hour-long script.

For all his other abilities, Dick Spring was no Bill Clinton when it came to addressing the faithful. The alliterative cluster that comes to mind is dry, drone, dreary, dead.

Either was Michael Noonan whose sharp wit never came out in his leader's speeches, which always sounded creepy enough to come straight from the cemetery.

One veteran Fine Gael TD told me that Liam Cosgrave always sounded and looked like a man who had just swallowed a bottle of rat poison.

Before Haughey it's a bit vague for me. I remember seeing some archive footage of the late Michael O'Leary in the late 1960s or early 1970s; probably before he became Labour leader. He was in full flow and seemed angry, impressive.

Who's good? Clinton obviously. Obama is, definitely. I remember seeing Chris Patten - the Tory Party chairman - speak at one of their Brighton or Bournemouth conference. He was electrifying.

Just a small note on Leaders Questions today. Enda Kenny brought up the results of this survey that suggested that a high number of Irish teenagers have experimented with drugs, tobacco and alcohol (see the debate here).

Leaders Questions allows opposition leaders to ask a question without notice. That means that Bertie Ahern does not have a clue what he will be asked about.

But he has very diligent and very prescient civil servants who prepare for all eventualities. In front of him each day is a big ledger-like book indexed from A to Z. So if somebody is asking him about a relatively obscure subject like a survey on teenagers he just flicks to T for Teenager or D for drugs to find the relevant details.

The most impressive use of the A to Z was when Pat Rabbitte asked a question about a family with autistic children in a week in which they were nowhere near the news. The Bert had the family's case history at his fingertips. It was impressive but also very weird - almost as weird as Trevor Sargent's speech this week.

And just to remind you of Sargent's other great performance this year, here is his unmissable guest appearance on Podge and Rodge.