Why Ross gave up Joy of parties with me and Mara

HIS enemies call him ‘Motormouth’, and last Monday evening when the Minister for Transport was driving home, a garda popped a breathalyser in his gob. Shane Ross was stopped at a checkpoint at around 7.45pm on the dual carriageway outside RTÉ in Donnybrook, heading to his house in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow.

Not every driver was tested, but as Ross’s 2006-registered Volvo V70 approached, a garda signalled to pull over and asked him to blow into the bag. Ross complied, the officer was pleasant and polite, and the breathalyser registered no alcohol.

It was the second time in a year that the teetotal minister was tested for drink-driving. Last summer he was pulled in near his office in Dublin and asked to blow into a breathalyser, before gardaí waved him on as that test was negative.

Ross’s breath test came in the wake of figures that showed nearly 1million phantom breath tests recorded on the Garda Pulse system. It also came as rural TDs’ campaign against his proposal to toughen the penalties for drink-driving was gaining traction on the airwaves.

But contrary to the Healy-Raes’ depiction of him as a killjoy for rural Ireland, Ross was once a party animal and legendary thrill-seeker.

In the early 1980s, Ross was a regular at Joys, a boutique nightclub in a basement in Baggot Street.

Back then puritans depicted Joys as a reincarnation of the Hellfire Club circa 1735 to 1741, a hunting lodge in the Dublin Mountains where raucous gentlemen spent their evenings.

Suspicion of hedonism usually leads to hyperbole; there was little debauchery in Joys, where Ross and other revellers, including bibulous politicians, drank pricey wine and boogied into the early morning. But in 1985, Ross and a few other regulars, including the late PJ Mara and myself, forswore the demon drink. After a few months the rest of us fell off the wagon, but Ross stayed sober to this day.

Friends said Ross really didn’t mind being breathalysed and felt that the gardaí were anxious to show that they were diligently enforcing the drink-driving laws.

Ross also broke the mould for Government ministers; in the past they would be chauffeured, while he insists on driving himself in the family Volvo wherever possible.

This weekend he is celebrating the end of the bus strike and raising a glass of his wife Ruth’s homemade lemonade to toast the glamorous union boss Patricia King, who intervened in the strike. Ms King, the ICTU chief, reiterated Ross’s message to the union and said the last thing the dispute needed was an intervention by the Minister for Transport. Cheers.

FAMILIES of cystic fibrosis patients will ask friends in Wicklow to vote for Simon Harris to thank him for making the life-changing drugs Orkambi and Kalydeco available to their nearest and dearest.

The HSE still has to find the money to cover the enormous price, but the Minister for Health put the cost in perspective, admitting that CF patients had not been properly or adequately catered for in the past.

‘Improper’ and ‘inadequate’ grossly understate how bad it was. Ireland has more CF patients per capita than any other country in the world – but until four years ago we had the most primitive treatment centres for CF in the developed world.

It took years of shaming, blaming and campaigning to have a national CF headquarters built at St Vincent’s Hospital – and Harris acknowledged that their scandalous past treatment entitles CF patients to be near the top of the queue when it comes to Government funding.

My daughter has CF and it was an enormous relief to see how the new CF unit – and the dedicated medical staff who work there – radically improved the quality of her life.

And the availability of the new medication will further ease the suffering of CF patients – so thank you, Simon Harris. THE smart money in Fine Gael is on Enda Kenny declaring that he will step down as party leader after the summit of the European Council on April 29.

Knowing his penchant for arcane anniversaries, I looked at historically significant events in Ireland that fell on April 29 down through the years. It is unlikely Kenny will share his steppingdown announcement with this 101st anniversary: ‘On April 29, Irish Republicans abandoned the post office (GPO in Dublin) and surrendered unconditionally, marking the end of the 1916 Uprising.’

POLITICAL cage fighting was a lost art resurrected when Minister for Communications Denis Naughten body-slammed Minister of State Michael Ring on Seán O’Rourke’s RTÉ radio show.

Independent Naughten accused Fine Gael’s Ring of abandoning the battle to save rural post offices. But within an hour Ring retaliated, asking if post offices were not the responsibility of the Minister for Communications.

It was old-time ballyragging learned from speechifying at church gates.

I HAVE always enjoyed George Hook’s obduracy and championing of unpopular causes on his Newstalk show, but his support for United Airlines after it had a passenger forcibly removed from a plane defied even Hooky logic.

When no passengers volunteered to give up their seats for airline staff, Dr David Dao was left bloodied as he was ejected.

However, even after United conceded it had behaved shamefully, George was still standing by the airline.