Tally-ho minister shouts from atop his high horse
SHANE Ross was shouting in the Dáil again yesterday, crowing the strident cry of the selfrighteous – all strangulated syllables.
He does it a lot, and without warning. One moment his slender form will be reclined languidly against the raised back of his seat, droning sonorously about one thing or another.
An instant later, and he will have whipped forward, usually jabbing his speech papers in the air, with wild yelling quickly following. Call it stockbroker shriek, rather than southside chic.
It’s disconcertingly akin to the squawks of the seagulls wheeling around Leinster House this summer. Perhaps he was a jobber on the Exchange back in the day, or a prize price-bawler at Billingsgate fish market in a former life. But it’s jobbery in the judiciary that is exercising his undoubtedly fine mind these days.
Yet he does himself no favours, and the on/off shrieking is actually emblematic of how he conducts himself more generally.
His leadership of the Independent Alliance has been judderingly stop/go An argument could be constructed that Mr Ross’s stop/ go and soft/shriek personality extends to his principles and his willingness to apply them.
He didn’t like it when it was commented upon that the same Cabinet meeting which saw erstwhile attorney general Máire Whelan’s elevation to the Court of Appeal happened to coincide with Mr Ross getting the reopening of Stepaside Garda Station in his own constituency. Horse trading? Shane Ross, previously the scourge of nakedly political appointments to the bench, even joined in the applause after the decision in favour of Ms Whelan, who hadn’t even left the room when her promotion was mooted.
Since appearances suddenly became important, Minister Ross next brazenly demanded a ‘review’ of the Whelan move. It bought him some time. Then there was the selective leaking that noble Mr Ross had threatened to leave Cabinet and that he had had to be soothed from the window ledge at the top of the Ivory Tower.
Leo dealt with that one – he said sweetly in the Dáil this week that he had had two phone calls last Sunday with Rosser and in neither had Mr Stepaside/Step Aside ever murmured a word about resignation. That should be embarrassing for a man who evidently likes to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.
But it has done little to soften the cough of the tally-ho Minister for Transport, who was famously photographed wearing a feather boa while bus workers were on strike. He was in full cry yesterday. And he will probably get what he wants, and without answering to anyone.
It was ever thus with the elite. We should trust our betters, one must suppose – and Shrill Ross would have it exactly so.