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Yesterday's cancelled Fine Gael first birthday party, basically a photo opportunity on Merrion Square, was certainly the most bizarre episode we have seen in Irish politics since the party returned to government a year ago.
At a time when people were queuing up to leave the country, the sight of the largest government party's TDs slapping themselves on the back would have been a slap in the face for most citizens.
It may not have been up there with Brian Cowen's abortive January 2011 cabinet reshuffle but it certainly came close.
When one witnesses episodes such as these one has to question just how firm a grip on reality many of our politicians actually have.
Surreal is one word that springs to mind.
What yesterday's events demonstrate yet again is that, despite all that has happened over the past four years, most of our politicians are still cocooned from the grim reality inhabited by the electorate who voted for them.
With their generous salaries and allowances and the archaic Leinster House procedures, they inhabit a sort of parallel universe where it will be forever 2007.
Much has been made of the fact that it was Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte, a Labour member of the Cabinet, who pointed out just how absurd an occasion yesterday's planned event would have been.
While coverage of Mr Rabbitte's intervention has inevitably focused on its possible implications for the stability of the Government, we cannot help feeling that Fine Gael should be extremely grateful to such a wily old campaigner for saving it from even further embarrassment.
Far more worrying for the future of the Government is that, until Mr Rabbitte's intervention, there seems to have been no-one within Fine Gael with the cop-on to realise just how daft the planned photo-op was.
If Mr Rabbitte hadn't gone on radio to prick the Fine Gael bubble of conceit and hubris, the party's ministers and backbenchers would have been plastered over our TV screens and newspapers telling us what a great job they were doing on the same day that AIB announced 2,500 job losses -- the biggest-ever single jobs loss announcement from any Irish company. What were these guys thinking of?
While Fine Gael, with a lot of help from Mr Rabbitte, eventually managed to extricate itself from a mess of its own making yesterday, the worry must be that it will not be so lucky the next time something goes awry.
If it can get something as trivial as a photo-op so disastrously wrong, how will the party conduct itself when, as is almost inevitable, it is confronted with a full-blown crisis at some stage during the life of this government?
Irish Independent
