BEWARE ye wenches of Westmeath, Longford and Roscommon. If a whitehaired senator is returned to the Dail, he'll be out looking for a wife. And this time Louis J. will take no prisoners. This time, he promises, it's going to be "all the way".
"I hope everybody was listening to that election promise," the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, laughed yesterday as he joined his party's Longford Roscommon candidate, Senator Louis Belton, on a midlands platform.
And it wasn't any old platform. Great moments in history had been debated under the clock tower in Kenagh, Co Longford - Senator Belton's native heath and the Irish bogland's answer to Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner.
The Boer War, the Siege of Mafeking, the Battle of the Somme... the Taoiseach recalled. And now? The decision of the Irish people to return this great Government to power in June 1997. And Louis J.'s marriage prospects.
Sporting rose pink shirt and tie, Mr Belton was ebullient. "I've no doubt that when they open the ballot boxes from Donegal to Cork John Bruton will still be Taoiseach after this election. In this constituency we have two other candidates, even though you might think here today that there's only one," he added, shaking a shy running mate's shoulder, that of Senator Denis Naughten.
Then Mr Belton hinted at the sort of spouse he might be looking for. The Taoiseach's good wife, Mrs Finola Bruton, was here by her husband's side, he noted. "And that's the place she should be with him," he cried to roars of delight.
If "bypass" was the Taoiseach's theme on Sunday, yesterday's buzz word was "biotechnology".
Irish people could benefit by technological developments, the Taoiseach said, in Athlone and in the villages of Ballymahon and Kenagh en route to Ardagh's tidy town, where he did some tree planting. Everybody would be included in this new megabyte age.
And John Unionist was now also John Socialist, it seemed, when asked to comment on the results of the French general election.
"I think it shows that the people in France want to see a government that has the right balance between the proper application of free market principles, which are necessary, but also social concern," Mr Bruton said.
