All Sorts of Double-speak

Enda and George will be looking to nail the Greens into the coffin on Tuesday. Both men know that the motion of no confidence will not succeed. Both know that if they were to move into government that in the eyes of the international community they’d be committed to supplying €4bn of taxpayers money to Anglo – not popular. Both know that the parties in power all across Europe are feeling the backlash from voters for their handling of the economic downturn. Both know the last thing the country needs is a general election.

Fine Gael also know that the Greens know that if they pull out now they won’t be back for two or three terms at best, but if they don’t pull out now they’ll be branded as Fianna Fáil puppets. The Greens are damned if they do, damned if they don’t – Fine Gael know it. The motion of no confidence is just a move to force the Greens to stay with Fianna Fáil thus providing another stick for the opposition to beat them with. Kenny can’t seriously want to send the country to the polls again.

Inda made a little mistake at the press call at which he announced the motion of no confidence. When asked – I paraphrase – “will the motion of no confidence steal the Ryan Report’s victims’ thunder in the Dáil next week following the report from the Bishops after their meeting with the Pope (due Monday)?”, Kenny said “the motion will supersede everything next week”. Supersede was the wrong word. I reckon Fianna Fáil will jump on this and attempt to brand themselves as champions of the victims while painting Fine Gael as insensitive and out-of-touch for playing politics at the wrong time. Then again, I could be wrong, it is election time – what else would they be playing. Kenny tends to do that type of thing though, use the wrong word, not grammatically but just a poor choice – it’s a problem – it’s one of the reasons he remains less popular than he probably should be.

Gormley looked downtrodden. He arrived moments before FG Presser and was bombarded with questions about the future of the coalition. He stuck to the party line. By the way the party line is something like “we’ll hang with the FFers because we have to now, but remember if we want to in a few weeks we can say that the review of the Program for Government isn’t to our liking and use that as a reason to pull out without looking like we’ve done a u-turn”.  I honestly think a few Green TDs will be getting itchy feet, they must realise if a general election was to crop up in the next 18 months they would be PD’d. Two years ago they won 18 council seats – the most in their history, if memory serves – by tomorrow night they will be almost a non-entity in local government – down to six or seven councilors. By the time Kenny and Lee had returned from a brief trip to the Fine Gael HQ in Mount Street for their pres briefing thingy, Gormley had disappeared.

Maurice Ahern looked optimistic early in the day – until it became clear Maureen O’Sullivan was going to take the Dublin Central seat. Hours later he was seen pacing up and down along the fence in from of the count for his LEA. An hour after that he was visibly disappointed.

Richard Bruton hung around all day looking gleeful. So was Alex White, in fairness to him.

I’ll be back in the RDS tomorrow for the European counts. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Ganley wins a seat or Ryan loses a seat. I put little faith in the tallies from today – though I hear Ganley is in with a shout and The Cope is up against it. Mary Lou said she was “still in there fighting” at a press gathering at about 7pm today, which stuck me as quite pessimistic optimism considering the official count hasn’t even started yet. I mean, I know DeRossa and Mitchell are safe but “still in there…”. Hmm.

Talking tallies, the vast majority of them should come with swine-flu-level health warnings but Childers and Burke are good? Who knows, probably. Maybe? We’ll know tomorrow.

Until then.