Typhoid Mary's gaffes are a wheeze for spluttering TDs
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Thursday September 24 2009
MARY Coughlan coughed up more ammunition for her critics yesterday, sending opposition TDs spluttering.
Like a one-woman swine flu outbreak, the Tanaiste reduced many members of the House to hacking sounds, creased stomachs, swimming eyes -- and suppressed noises of strangulation.
Typhoid Mary spread the foot-in-mouth virus far and wide. First she said that many recommendations of the An Bord Snip Nua report "do not make sense", thereby comprehensively dismissing Colm McCarthy, the economist the Government asked to help dig it out of a hole.
The opposition snorted and sneezed their derision. Then Mary said there had not been a Cabinet meeting this week, when in fact there had been, the day before -- when she herself presided over it. Doh! More TDs were assisted from the chamber, apparently unwell.
Undaunted, the Tanaiste continued to fling her bon mots far and wide, like Johnny Appleseed at the National Ploughing Championship. And then she really, really dissolved the House . . .
Mary offered to give us all a general election. Perhaps even the Taoiseach fainted when that one was texted to him on his transatlantic mobile telephone.
She had been innocently asked the date of the Budget -- usually held in the first week of December, but famously brought forward last year.
"It will be the Cabinet that will decide what day the election will . . ." the Tanaiste said.
Then, Einstein-like, she realised what she had uttered. "What day the election . . ." she repeated, mocking herself.
As guffaws rang around the chamber, she managed: "Well, it's like this -- I'm looking up at the gallery and I can just imagine what's going to be written. But the date of the Budget . . ."
The remainder of her remarks was lost to interruptions. Nobody fell to the usual Dail conspiracy theories that a planned snap election is on the way, and that Mary must know something the rest of us don't.
Everyone simply took it as a given that there is absolutely nothing that Mary knows that the rest of us don't.
Thus, it was a case of panic over before it even began. Perhaps, after repeated exposure to the Coughlan pathogen, the senior party leaders simply have developed a certain immunity.
Just before signalling an election, and a little time after the possibly inadvertent insulting of Colm McCarthy, the Tanaiste had maintained: "We didn't have a Cabinet meeting yesterday and we won't have a Cabinet meeting until next week."
Mary thus mystified the many who had sat around the Cabinet table with her on Tuesday, taking Government decisions. After her election bloomer, she continued: "The Cabinet will decide the date of the Budget when the Cabinet meets." And she repeated: "The Cabinet hasn't met this week."
The Constitution is quite specific that the Tanaiste acts for the Taoiseach at Cabinet in the absence of the Head of Government. Leinster House journalists had even been given a cabinet briefing after it concluded
We were told all about its decision to clear Mary's own measure, the Labour Services (Amendment) Bill 2009, which will reform FAS and slim its board down from 17 to 11 members. Dear old ditzy Mary. It's all passing by in a bit of a blur.
- Senan Molony
