Troy’s Achilles weakness hurt already vulnerable Coalition

IN THE dark ’60s our primary teacher Frank Gordon lit up our lives with heroic accounts in Homer’s Iliad and also told us how poor Achilles was killed at the end of the war over Troy. Achilles was some operator, an extraordinary fighter whose body was invulnerable to all kinds of slings and arrows, with one tiny exception. He had a dodgy heel.

This was because his mother held him by the heel when dipping him into the protective waters of the river Styx – and it was through that heel that Paris shot and killed him with an arrow.

After hearing Mr Gordon’s account of how Achilles met his end one of my excited friends relayed the entire story to his mother. She replied: ‘My god, when I dipped you I must have been holding your entire head.’

And this week, that’s precisely what I thought must have happened as well to our own Trojan non-hero

Robert Troy, as he quit his minister of State job over failure to declare all property interests as required for members of the Dáil.

Mr Troy’s ‘clear the air’ interview with Bryan Dobson on News at One on Tuesday was the proverbial car crash. It put on public display his extraordinary vulnerability in terms of judgement. His head was all over the place. It certainly hadn’t been dipped in the Styx, and that’s for sure.

HIS manifest political stupidity hardly explains what he was thinking. When Mr Dobson pointed out the declaration requirements couldn’t be clearer and applied to properties held for any period during the relevant year, Deputy Troy came out with the most memorable clanger, ‘I didn’t give the process the due diligence it deserves’.

Try that the next time you’re pulled over by your local friendly garda and asked to explain why you were bombing it in a 50kph zone. ‘I didn’t give the process due diligence’.

And when the taxman inquires why you haven’t made any VAT returns for months despite lashing it onto the invoices, try out the Troy excuse, ‘Ah sure, I didn’t give the process due diligence’.

Such self-maiming, unforced, political asininity raises, of course, the issue of competence of all senior and junior ministers. And by the looks of things, the standard is not all that exacting.

Eamon Ryan is now unconvincingly promising to keep the lights on this winter despite energy security threats that have been signposted for years, well before Vlad the Bad Putin went medieval in Ukraine. This is in the context of Mr Ryan’s implacable opposition to a liquified natural gas terminal in the Shannon Estuary which would boost carbon energy reserves that we badly need, even in the event of full transition to renewables.

Darragh O’Brien is in the horrors at the Department of Housing, with little if anything to show in the way of progress after more than two years on the job. And Stephen Donnelly has done diddly-squat over in Health, still the Angola Brian Cowen branded it years ago.

In Justice, Helen McEntee’s latest production features her sanctioning the transfer to Britain of a convicted murderer, thereby depriving the victim’s mother of the right to be heard by the Irish Parole Board in the event of the killer applying for release. Meanwhile, the gardaí are still showing serious signs of dysfunction and whistleblowers are being treated in a manner that is suboptimal, to say the least.

The Troy affair has undermined the authority of Taoiseach Micheál Martin as he prepares to exit the top job in December to become Tánaiste.

And it has given more ammunition to Sinn Féin for its march on Government Buildings.

This Government’s vulnerability is not just an Achilles heel. It’s much worse than that.