Grilled Gerry, paranoid chickens and Donald’s carpet

Donald Trump, Chicken-Licken and Carol Vorderman made unexpected appearances in Fine Gael’s election bunker yesterday. A welcome diversion as the back-and- forth arguments about budget costings – and how many billions may or may not be at the disposal of the next government – continue to bore and bamboozle.

Senior politicians are running amok at press conferences and on the airwaves, high as kites on the hypotheticals. This endless bickering about figures is playing well for Opposition parties and the wildly differing strands of Independents. For them, confusion is good when an unhappy electorate is searching for reasons not to return the current shower.

They want reasons to be cheerful, not reams of statistics and projected outcomes all bound up in a recovery that many have yet to see.

Fianna Fáil seems to have stepped back from the argument. Micheál Martin is criss-crossing the country doing old-fashioned walkabouts. Out pressing the flesh, leaning in, doing the listening thing.

He’s good at the “real issues” stuff and it shifts attention from his party’s less than shining record in dealing with them when they were in charge. Micheál is doing so well we’re beginning to wonder how the halcyon days of his tenure in health and the golden era of Fianna Fáil managed to pass by so many of us.

But back at the turn-off that is the fiscal space, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael are still going at it hammer and tongs.

Yesterday both parties held briefings on the economy and their plans in the area of personal taxation and spending. Sinn Féin did their thing in the morning, Fine Gael stepped up in the afternoon.

Radio grilling

It was a woeful start for the Shinners, when it was Gerry Adams’s turn to undergo a radio grilling at the stern hand of RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke. It didn’t go well for the Sinn Féin leader, who proved extremely shaky on actual detail and was most indignant when not allowed to address crucial SF policy questions with rhetoric about solving all the economic ills of the nation with the help of patriotic high-earners channelling the 1916 spirit.

O’Rourke ate him without salt.

Not long afterwards, Pearse Doherty, the party spokesman on finance, went about repairing the damage in his fluent and efficient way.

Not that he knew he was doing this when unveiling Sinn Féin’s “plan for a fair recovery and long-term economic growth”. In the light of his leader’s interview, did he consider him a liability to the party in the campaign?

“I didn’t hear the interview on Seán O’Rourke, I was travelling here earlier on.” He must have been listening to Lyric, or perhaps, as his car approached the capital, Spin 1038.

“No is the answer to that,” stressed Pearse. Gerry Adams has led the party “for many, many years” and the latest opinion polls show Sinn Féin nearly doubling its support.

You can’t argue with that.

Although his leader’s latest outing brought to mind a variation on the old gag about why you have to bring a bibulous friend everywhere twice: once to go to the party and a second time to apologise.

In Adams’s case it’s more like “Why do Sinn Féin have to explain everything twice? Once for Gerry to say it and the second time for Pearse/Mary Lou to clarify.”

Fine Gael projections

Not for the first time, Doherty called the Minister for Finance a liar, accusing him of deliberately misinforming the public about FG’s expenditure projections. Not surprisingly, Noonan vehemently disagrees with the allegations.

He said so at the launch of a “FG income calculator” at the party’s election HQ in Dublin’s financial services district.

“It’s not enough to make an assertion, you have to prove it and there’s no point in saying that Fine Gael got the figures wrong unless you have the evidence for it.” Noonan said his figures have been endorsed by the Department of Finance and his party “fully and completely stand” over them.

Sinn Féin’s figure have also been costed by the Department of Finance and given the okay. What’s going on? Maybe the Kildare Street mandarins should be asked to slug it out with themselves in a cage fight, even if everyone knows they will award themselves a draw.

“I think Pearse’s problem is that he took his maths grinds, or else went to night school, at the Gerry Adams maths school, and he should have gone to somebody who is smarter at the arithmetic than Gerry was. He’s wrong and he’s just making an allegation and he’s not standing it up,” drawled Noonan.

Income calculator

As for the “income calculator”, which is on the party’s website for people to see how much better off they would be under the FG proposals, it was pressed into action for the delectation of the media.

Simon Harris was in charge, going through the various family units and what extra earnings they get. The screen was a little slow too load.

“I’d never get a job as Carol Vorderman here. She was quicker with the figures,” he declared, waiting for the numbers for a dual income family to go up. “There you go, €2,919, there you go!”

Then Noonan was asked if he regretted rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump when he came to Clare to open his Doonbeg resort.

“I was responding to an invitation from Shannon Airport to go and meet ‘The Donald’,” explained the Minister. “It was a cold morning, and we were there at the side of the red carpet. There were various fiddlers from Bunratty Castle playing lonesome tunes into the morning air . . . I was doing what Ministers in my region have done for a long time – supporting Shannon Airport and trying to attract additional business.” He would do it again, if asked.

But would he do it for Trumps.

“Well, sure if he was president, sure I’d nearly have to!”

And what about Chicken-Licken?

She came via talk of risk assessment.

“In managing an economy, you can’t stand still. If you shy away from every risk that’s identified, you’ll make no decisions, you’ll do nothing,” began Noonan.

“You’ll be a kind of a Chicken-Licken economist who, when the nut fell on her, she ran down the road screaming ‘the sky is falling!’ And, honestly, the Opposition remind me of that – there’s a lot of Chicken-Licken economists writing for the newspapers and out there in the Opposition, especially among the Independents: the sky is always going to fall in. But if you believe the sky is always going to fall in, if you’re the minister for finance, you’ll get totally paralysed and immobilised and you won’t do anything.”

Then he got stuck into Fianna Fáil. There’s a €1.24 billion gap in their figures which is like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Only a week to go. Thanks be to God.