Gilmore pushes all the right buttons

CONFERENCE SKETCH:IN THE run-up to Labour's weekend gathering, an advance party from headquarters arrived to check out the hotel.

De Brudders took one look at the massive chandeliers in the conference hall and had a fit of the vapours. A unanimous decision was taken there and then. “They’ll have to come down!” And so they did.

This was not to shield delegates from the vulgar excesses of the Celtic Tiger era. No. De Brudders did not want anybody or anything to outshine Eamon Gilmore on Saturday night. The chandeliers posed a definite risk. With the help of a scaffold and a team of strong men, the two offending light fittings were removed.

In fairness, the job had to be done because the chandeliers were in the way of the television cameras. When viewers tuned in to hear Eamon’s keynote speech, all they would have seen was an assortment of bulbs and the vague image of a man in a red tie shimmering behind the heat haze.

As it turned out, no amount of tinkering with the fixtures and fittings in the Mullingar Park Hotel could help Gilmore on Saturday night. The leader of the Labour Party had to compete with a World Cup qualifier.

That was hard luck. He bore up stoically. Eamon opened with a gag, which went down great with the delegates but will have reminded his television viewer to switch over to the match.

“You know what’s really great about being the leader of the Labour Party? You get to see the first part of the match. We were still 1-0 up anyway when I left it.”

They couldn’t have cheered louder had he scored Ireland’s opener. So instead, they waved their “Gilmore for Taoiseach” placards in the air.

Sadly, by the time he finished, Bulgaria had equalised.

Delegates didn’t mind, because they think they’re on the way back to government. Nothing could put them in bad humour, not even the latest opinion poll, which saw Labour slipping in the ratings.

Gilmore was philosophical about the figures. “You know all the clichés when they go up and you know all the clichés when they go down,” he said yesterday.

A bit like the Labour Party, in a way. They know the clichés when the economy goes down and when it goes up, but it’s the nitty-gritty in between that gets them.

These days, conferences have become the political equivalent of a racing parade ring, used as an opportunity to trot out election candidates before the public.

Labour’s European election candidates were to the fore on Saturday, none more so that his Ireland South flagbearer Alan Kelly. He gives the impression that he thinks he’s already won the seat, oozing with confidence while sending his young besuited PR man to work the media on his behalf.

Senator Kelly was chosen to introduce his party leader before the main event and he was first on the platform for the post-speech camera-hogging exercise. He grabbed his boss’s hand and thrust it in the air so you could see the red lining in Eamon’s jacket, and the panic on his face as he wondered if his shoulder had been dislocated.

Journalist Susan O’Keeffe, a woman who will be for ever remembered for badgering Larry Goodman with a microphone as he was driving away from Mass, has yet to acquire a brass neck.

In what is a rare sight at Irish party conferences, somebody had to push the candidate for Ireland North West forward while Eamon strong-armed her into the shot.

Nessa Childers, running in Ireland East, showed that she had finally cast off the shackles of her long association with the Green Party by wearing an ensemble that was 40 shades of, er, green.

The old hands were not to be outdone. Michael D Higgins, in a scene reminiscent of Brian O’Driscoll’s Grand Slam try, doggedly burrowed his way to the front on the pack. Joan Burton, a crowd favourite, almost made it to her leader’s shoulder. However, to make the final distance, she would have had to knock his son Seán out of the way.

The experts in these matters had concluded before Gilmore even opened his mouth that the speech wasn’t up to much. No meat, nothing much new in the script.

“What makes Labour’s economic policy different can be summed up in single four-letter word: jobs,” said Eamon.

A text message from a Fianna Fáil sympathiser landed almost immediately in our inbox. “Four letter word to describe Labour’s economic policy? None.”

It was a good speech, but what made it was the manner of its delivery. Gilmore nailed it.

He pressed all the right buttons, tapping into the anger of taxpayers who feel they are being scalped by the Government while the wealthy and well-connected are given an easy ride.

“Reserved enclosures are for race courses, not hospitals,” he told his audience, as they cheered his vow to end “crony capitalism”.

There was the obligatory disgusted spit at the defunct Fianna Fáil “tint”. “It is not enough to dismantle the Galway tent – we have to break up the cosy cartel that sheltered under its roof.” Afterwards, delegates spilled into the bar and celebrated being half popular and not being in Fianna Fáil. “It’s a pleasure to be out canvassing at the moment,” said Cllr Dermot Lacey.

There was a “Labour Women Raffle” with tickets just €2 each. It was rumoured that Brian Lenihan sent in an agent with deep pockets in an attempt to win Joan Burton so he could incarcerate her in a soundproofed room until the upturn.

Local deputy Willie Penrose, in tandem with his brother Johnny, hosted a “social” with music by the Tennessee Breakdown Country Band.

Gilmore couldn’t be kept off the dance floor, doing old-time waltzes and throwing back his leg like a two-year-old. At least with this display of luminous extravagance, he had nothing to fear from the chandeliers.