FG prepares for the flood

Fine Gael may be taking the Flood tribunal too literally. The party has been convinced for some time that a great deluge will engulf the wicked (i.e. Fianna Fail) but it went a bit far at the weekend ardfheis, when TDs and senators were marched on to the stage, two-by-two, like passengers for Noah's ark.

They came in all their glorious varieties: the broad (Michael Noonan and Nora Owen), the long (Alan Dukes and Phil Hogan) and the short (Brian Hayes and Gay Mitchell). If the ardfheis speeches were to be taken seriously, it won't be for lack of effort that they don't multiply in the next general election.

There's only one Simon Coveney, more's the pity for Fine Gael. If there were two, it would certainly try to breed them. A video presented him as the post-Flood face of Irish politics and before introducing Mr Bruton's presidential address, Nora Owen even led the young Cork-man to the podium to take the applause.

And if Fine Gael seemed to be all about Simon Coveney, you'd be forgiven for thinking Fianna Fail was all about Brian Cowen. The mere mention of the Offaly man in John Bruton's speech drew hisses from the audience, as though he were the wicked witch in a pantomime.

"The Tyrannosaurus Rex of Tullamore" was what the Fine Gael leader called him, and that was one of the milder descriptions. A "rhinoceros in heat" was one of Alan Shatter's who, attempting to give the Minister for Health a dose of his own medicine, also called him "a national disgrace" and accused him of doing the work of two men ("Beavis and Butthead") in Government. "The Doctor Strangelove of the health service" was Michael Noonan's offering.

This would all be water off a rhino's back for Mr Cowen, of course, but by contrast the Taoiseach got off lightly. Mr Noonan did call him "the Manuel of this Fawlty Towers Government" ("I know nawthing - I'm from Drumcondra.") In what looked like an attempt to put the Taoiseach's domestic situation in relief, Mr Bruton's family was placed centre stage on Saturday night. Finola wore white, as she accompanied the blushing bridegroom up the aisle and the Bruton children were prominent in a circular seating arrangement which could have been borrowed from a post-Vatican II church.

It won't be lost on Mr Bruton that his predecessor, Alan Dukes, was done down through lack of preparation for the weather (remember "if it was raining soup, Mr Dukes would be holding a fork"). So when the Fine Gael leader promised that in government he would increase child benefit to £20 a week, you knew this was a party on an election footing.

All the hatches have been battened down and at the end of his address Mr Bruton looked for all the world like Noah, standing on the deck of the ark, waiting for the clouds to burst.