Bertie dodges deep end and John's plastic foam sword
WE couldn't see how Bertie had much to fear from a €5 blue plastic and foam toy sword.
But you can't be too careful in Limerick - or so the gardai must have felt, because they confiscated it forthwith.
And then hid it behind their backs so the Taoiseach needn't be alarmed by even the mere sight of it.
Bertie need never fear when Willie O'Dea is around. Swift to action like a little toy soldier, that's him.
The man who had actually forked out for this deadly piece of weaponry, solicitor John Devane, who is standing as an independent candidate in the election, was most affronted, having waited patiently for Bertie outside the Jetland Shopping Centre for ages, with the toy concealed in his suit jacket.
But the eagle-eyed gardai spotted something afoot and asked him what it was. Nothing, he said. They insisted on seeing it. Reluctantly he produced it.
"It's plastic," he pleaded with them. But to no avail and it was taken off him.
Willie O'Dea's chest swelled with triumph - another triumph for the Defence system - on his home turf and involving the Boss. Excellent.
Undeterred from his mission, John took to shouting at the Taoiseach instead but his soft Limerick voice was barely audible. "You're a liar," he yelled. Why didn't he pay his taxes - everybody else has to.
"Fall on your sword," he cried - and then we saw where he had been going with the plastic toy. Very theatrical.
It was Bertie's second brush with death that day, having first penetrated the defences of Enda's Mayo fortress - payback time after his rival had brazenly taken to his own home streets the previous day.
But the Fianna Fail attempted coup in Claremorris was strictly a limited affair.
There was little mingling with the regular people on the street and they kept it to an hour, at a small number of planned venues with a carefully planted audience of Fianna Fail friends.
A posse of supporters was waiting for Bertie at Fireplace Madness at the new retail park on Ballindine Road. Then on to pose outside a green field site for the proposed OPW decentralisation office, where 150 jobs are coming, we were told.
'Calleary delivers decentralisation to Claremorris,' trumpeted the posters.
But the politicians didn't hang around for fear of embarassing questions being asked about where exactly the decentralisation issue had been decentralised to.
At the local swimming pool, we feared a riot such were the screams emanating from within the building.
But this was no security alert. The frenzied chanting turned out to be "Bertie, Bertie" from the children of Dunmore NS in Co Galway who had been swimming around as they waited for him all morning, shrivelling into prunes in the process.
Then lifeguard Michael Hegarty grabbed hold of Bertie and pretended to throw him in, much to the amusement of the youngsters.
The Taoiseach beat a retreat, shaking slippery hands all round.
"It's only just a pity they didn't throw him in," muttered one mother in disappointment.
He went on to bless a new hotel. "Make sure you keep the transfers tight," he instructed the followers. Hurray, they cried.
Swallowing his nerves, he climbed into the dreaded chopper and headed for Castlerea and Portumna and then on to Limerick.
It wasn't the last security fright that Bertie had that day. His eyes stood out on stalks when asked about his stalker, revealed in a story in the Evening Herald.
"Do we know about this," he muttered to a party aide. "It's all right," she assured him.
At the Busy Kids creche in Limerick city, Birthday girl Caoimhe Healy (3) was tucking into the Rice Krispie buns but she was too shy to give Bertie a hug.
But Fianna Fail always get them in young and little Olivia Power (2) - daughter of Fianna Fail election candidate Peter Power - came over all by herself and asked to be lifted up.
A political future is surely guaranteed - for one of them at least.
