The Dáil panto... it should be behind us
TWINK wasn’t in the Dáil last Thursday so the ‘Votegate’ farce could not be officially designated as the first pantomime of the season. Fine Gael’s principle boys played the charade as a melodrama after the Fianna Fáil leader recast a couple of his shadow ministers as backbench spear-carriers. If one had asked: ‘Where is my career?’ – the other would have replied: ‘It’s behind you.’
When Niall Collins TD voted six times for his friend Timmy Dooley TD when he was not in the Dáil chamber, both were clearly too clever by half.
Their voting scam was not dissimilar to a workmate in a factory who clocks in or out for a friend – and the response depends on how widespread the practice is.
If everybody knows about it – and keeps quiet – it is treated as a misdemeanour. But an opportunistic boss can consider the same act as serious fraud.
Fine Gael and Sinn Féin decided to coalesce in righteous indignation and declare deputies Dooley and Collins to be moral lepers.
THE excuses offered to the Dáil by the two Fianna Fáilers strained credibility and was more offensive than the stroke for which they were apologising. Lisa Chambers was given the benefit of what Father Ted described as ‘the lovely girl’ defence – and the Mayo TD has been impressive on Fianna Fáil’s front bench.
It turned out that Fine Gaelers vote for each other too with a nod and a wink: but they had only done it when a colleague was in eye contact in the locked chamber. Fine Gaelers are incurably semantic – and shamelessly hypocritical.
Catherine Connolly, a wise woman on the Independents bench, slammed Fine Gael’s ‘star chamber’ approach – but her colleague,
Maureen O’Sullivan, joined her criticism of the Fianna Fáil leader.
Boris Johnson’s threat of an imminent election in the UK will postpone bullish ministers’ rush to the polls in November – and Micheál Martin expects the delay will buy time for Fianna Fail to recover from the voting debacle.
It was an unedifying week for Fianna Fáil but Fine Gael’s rush to the high moral ground might have reactivated an old malady: altitude sickness.