An Irishman's Diary

YOU’D NEARLY have to admire Fianna Fáil. Just when we thought the party faced electoral annihilation, its extraordinary power to adapt and survive is reasserting itself. Hence the detail in the ad (Business This Week, yesterday) for a new Director of Communications, who will manage the party’s relations not just with the media, but also with “other relevant stakeholders”.

This is a commendably frank assessment of FF’s current unpopularity with much of the press and the electorate. But it also hints at the drastic action that will be required of anyone trying to get rid of the Soldiers of Destiny.

It looks like Conor Cruise O’Brien’s famous comment about Charlie Haughey: “If I saw [him] buried at midnight at a crossroads, with a stake driven through his heart . . . I should continue to wear a clove of garlic round my neck, just in case” – can now be applied to all of Fianna Fáil. With one proviso. We know that some of its members have also been building up resistance to garlic, so even that may no longer work.

No doubt Fianna Fáil would still lose an election if it were held tomorrow. But as its poll ratings creep upwards again and other parties self-destruct, the chances of winning yet another term no longer seems as outlandish as they did last autumn.

This must be why the recruitment campaign is being carried out in conjunction with a company called “MERC Partners”.

Speaking of which, even this week’s bad news for the environmentally-friendly Toyota Prius cars – the brand chosen by the Green ministers – made the main Government party look good. “Them’s the brakes,” FF might have said to its junior partners. No wonder Déirdre de Búrca’s resignation letter sounded so awe-struck about FF’s political skills.

“From stonewalling us and trying to unravel key aspects of our policy initiatives . . . to ignoring our input into the preparation of new legislation, to reneging on two key agreements . . . the Fianna Fáil Party continues to ‘run rings’ around us and to take advantage of our inexperience and our very obvious fear of facing the electorate,” she wrote. If he were still alive to hear such a glowing tribute, Charlie Haughey would have been a proud man.

AS FOR FINE GAEL, it seemed like a cruel joke when this paper's Ticket magazine yesterday carried a feature about something called the "Glee effect". On closer inspection, the article turned out to be about a US TV show currently revolutionising the pop charts, and expected to have a No 1 album shortly with Glee The Music, Vol 1.

Even so, this leads us neatly to an e-mail from Irish Timesreader and song-writer John Ward, who has been moved to put FG's setback to music. Not in the Blues (or even Blueshirt) style, as you might think appropriate. No, like Enda Kenny, John's song is a country-and-western production. It's called: " You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, George Lee!" and is sung in the style of a man called "Kenny Rogered".

All together now:

“At a bar in Rathfarnham, I spoke to the barman/I told him, turn on the TV/I’d read in the papers some Fine Gael capers/Complaining about poor George Lee./So we turned on the telly and there’s Enda Kenny/Trying hard not to say he was wrong,/He burbled and blustered and looked very flustered/And finished by singing this song:

“You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, George Lee!/It’s bad for the party and it’s not good for me,/’Cos with your defection I’ll lose the election/And Taoiseach I never will be,/You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, George Lee!”

AMONG OTHER THINGS, Déirdre de Búrca's letter admitted that she and her fellow Greens had "lost our way" in Government.

So perhaps they could all do worse than visit Dublin Airport, at the earliest opportunity, to take advantage of the new “intuitive way-finding solution” which, as we noted earlier this week, has been introduced there.

Despite the fears we expressed, the system appears to be working well. Indeed, a Dublin Airport Authority spokeswoman informs us that the first week of operation passed without a single customer complaint, or a report of any passengers missing.

And sure enough, in the first big test of the system, a delegation of Fine Gael leaders successfully negotiated the new boarding gate numbers on Thursday, en route to Paris; even though they were clearly shocked and disoriented by the week’s events.

True, one of the group – Simon Coveney – flew out of Cork instead of Dublin, as originally planned.

But this was not because of a mix-up with gate numbers, or an example of counter-intuitive way-finding. No. He just had to go home for his passport instead.

The main thing is that the Fine Gael group made it to Paris eventually. And of course they will find lots of garlic there, not that it may be any use to them. But if there is any consolation in this week’s events, it is that the main opposition party has reached something of a crossroads. All it needs now is a stake.