Joe Costello's left-wing credentials remained intact despite arrival in the Lord Mayor's carriage, writes SEÁN Mac CONNELL
WHAT DO you say to one of Ireland’s best-known socialists when he steps daintily out of an ornate carriage built in 1789 and drawn by four black horses outside that oasis of Irish conservatism, the Royal Dublin Society in Ballsbridge?
Even the media corps was stunned into silence yesterday with the arrival in the Lord Mayor’s Coach of one Joe Costello TD, the champion of the left, defender of the people, the man who afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.
Was he not a bit ashamed of himself as he was coached along the leafy roads of Dublin 4 past the waiting peasants to be met by men in bowler hats to walk a
red carpet into the 136th Fáilte Ireland Dublin Horse Show?
“Not a bit,” said the man from Geevagh. “I am only the Lord Mayor’s wife and I am doing my civic duty.”
And so he was, too, the Labour deputy dispensing Mayor Emer Costello’s speech script to the waiting press people and pressing the flesh himself as he explained he had “a bit of horse” in his background.
“I once came third in the
Lough Bo derby which is a horse race around the lake below Geevagh on the
Sligo/Roscommon border where I was brought up on a farm,” he confessed.
“However, it was my uncle’s horse not mine and I was only 15 at the time and I only came third,” he said by way of explanation.
And how did his socialism equate with living in one of the best addresses in Europe, the Mansion House on Dawson Street, he was asked.
“Very easily and not only that, I work at one of the best addresses in town, Leinster House, which is just around the corner so I can walk there and leave no carbon footprint at all,” he said.
Warming to the challenge the media ploughed on. There had to be some downside in where he now finds himself.
But Joe Costello rose to that challenge as well. He expressed concern that only on two occasions annually does the Lord Mayor’s carriage in which he had arrived be taken out for a jaunt.
One, he said, was for the opening of the horse show and the second was to travel the short distance from the Mansion House to the GPO for the St Patrick’s Day parade.
“It never really goes northside at all and I would like to see that changed. I will have to do something about that if I can,” he said.
And so he left us, joining the throngs of Dubliners who had come out to enjoy the opening day of the show, just like any ordinary person.