Interview may haunt Taoiseach

MUCH ado about nothing. A storm in a teacup. The last straw that broke the camel’s back. Take your pick. Brian Cowen’s interview on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on Tuesday may have done irreparable damage to the Taoiseach. Or perhaps it will all blow away and be forgotten about in a week or two. It is too early to say.

It was only last Sunday afternoon on my way out of the camogie All-Ireland finals in Croke Park that I met a man who voted for Fine Gael all his life but told me he is going to vote for Fianna Fáil at the next election. You don’t believe me? Or perhaps you don’t believe him. You don’t believe that such a person exists. Or if there is such a person that he should be taken into custody and locked up for his own safety?
There is so much anger out there that people are afraid to admit that they might vote for Fianna Fáil, never mind a Fine Gael person saying they will vote for that party at the next election.
You might think the man should have his head examined. The country is in dire straits after 13 years of Fianna Fáil rule. The future looks grim and the Minister for Finance tells us the budget he will introduce to the Dáil in less than three months’ time will be even more savage than last year’s budget.
We are well used to hearing people on Liveline and other radio programmes telling us that they voted Fianna Fáil all their lives but will never do so again because of the mess the country is in. However, here is a man doing the very opposite, swimming against the tide, as it were. Why is this Blueshirt voting for the hated Fianna Fáil party and ignoring the party he and his father before him supported all their lives?
It is because the local Fianna Fáil TD attended his mother’s funeral last July. He is turning his back on the party his father would have died for and is voting for Fianna Fáil because the local Fianna Fáil TD was better at playing cute-hoor politics than his Dáil deputy colleagues were.
“Well he was the only TD to pay his respects at my mother’s funeral,” said this man to me. “He deserves my number one now,” he added. I don’t know why the other TDs were not at the funeral too. I think they might have been on holidays at the time.
So now you have it. It doesn’t matter how this Fianna Fáil TD votes in the Dáil or how the country is being ruled by his party. The fact that he had gone to my friend’s mother’s funeral was enough to persuade my friend to turn his coat and vote for Fianna Fáil at a time when everybody else seems to be turning against the Government.
Is it any wonder that TDs spend far more time looking after their constituencies than they do in the Dáil? After all, all politics is local. People can talk all they like about the need for Dáil reform and about the need for the House to sit at least four days a week, rather than the present two-and-a-half days and about the need to take shorter holidays at summer, Christmas, Easter and St Patrick’s Day. But the be all and end all of a TD’s career is how he looks after his constituents.
If a TD was to take his job seriously and say to himself, “I will not attend any more funerals in the constituency unless I know the person who has died or that person’s next-of-kin,” he would not survive too long as a TD.
However, we do not want that kind of a TD. We want our TDs to be at our beck and call all the time. We don’t want them ever to say no to anything we ask. We want them to be our messenger boys and girls.
It’s ok for them to be up in Dublin spouting about the economy or about the banks but they better not forget where they came from. They better not forget that it is we who voted for them and if they don’t look after us, we won’t look after them. It is as simple as that.
No wonder the country is in the state it is in.
Now I wonder does my friend still feel the same about Fianna Fáil today if he listened to Brian Cowen’s interview on Tuesday morning. The interview was coming from the Fianna Fáil think-in at the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway and it was obvious that the Taoiseach had been up late the night before. He sounded so tired and fatigued that he might have been talking in his sleep.
I cannot understand why he went on air so early in the morning if he had so little sleep the night before. Where were his handlers? They should have insisted he stay in bed and let RTÉ find somebody else to interview.
As I write this column, it is not clear where this thing will end. The controversy over Brian Cowen’s chat with Cathal Mac Coille may gather pace and come back to cause further damage to him at the next election.
Enda Kenny’s infamous appearance on The Late Late Show earlier this year certainly damaged the Fine Gael leader and was one of the reasons he had to face a front-bench revolt later in the year.
Will Brian Cowen’s terrible performance on Morning Ireland this week come back to haunt him over the coming months and lead to a heave against the Taoiseach?
This story is only unfolding as I write.