BALDY AND the Beast. Not quite the stuff of Disney, but with Michael Noonan and James Reilly playing the principal roles on Enda’s new front bench, Fine Gael is daring to dream of a fairytale ending.
Expect the skin and hair to fly, literally.
Noonan is back in town, with that wicked grin and a dangerous glint in his eye.
Fine Gael’s battle-scarred bruiser means business. It was written all over his face yesterday.
When Enda Kenny finally confirmed the identity of his new finance spokesman, the knot in Fianna Fáil’s unsettled stomach will have tightened another few notches.
This could be fun.
Reilly is bristling with intent, now that he has been installed as Kenny’s second in command.
The bellowing beard of Irish politics won’t be taking any prisoners in the lead-up to the next election.
The doctor from north Dublin intends to carry on where he left off. “I think the bedside manner I’ve developed over the years will suffice for my new job,” he dripped.
God help us all.
(Somebody once observed that the hirsute Reilly wouldn’t look out of place in a silent movie, tying a screaming damsel to the railway tracks.)
He talked of “steel” and “hard steel” when describing the qualities of Enda Kenny’s post-putsch shadow cabinet. Reilly’s approach to taking on the Coalition might be best summed up in the catchphrase of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army: “They don’t like it up ’em!”
This really could be fun . . .
But it was the return of Michael Noonan to frontline duties that most captured the imagination. A combination of domestic tragedy and a traumatic political disaster saw him withdraw from the sharp end of politics for the last eight years.
“My personal circumstances have changed. Things are different now,” he explained.
His beloved wife Florence, who is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and about whom he spoke so movingly during a recent television interview, is now in permanent nursing-home care.
He feels he can now return to the fray.
We’d forgotten how good he can be. Less than an hour into his new position, he was out on the airwaves taking about “doc-a-ments” and “milluns” and “billuns” and vowing to take the fight to his opposite number, Brian Lenihan.
Noonan has hit the ground snarling. “I’ll be making a series of statements before too long,” he said at Enda’s afternoon unveiling ceremony.
That sounded like a man who had a bit of time to think himself back into the finance portfolio. When the rest of his colleagues were still wondering what job the leader might give them, clearly Michael knew what he was going to get.
Which might explain why he was positively fizzing with ideas from the off. He played a very clever game in the leadership contest and looked like the Cheshire cat who got the cream.
Although not far behind him was Enda Kenny, who has grown in stature since he repelled the advancing rebels.
His new team mustered for the media – the favoured loyalists and the lucky conspirators who came in from the cold – and marched across from Leinster House to the Merrion Hotel.
Just before the front bench made its first public appearance, one of the dropped rebels, former agriculture spokesman Michael Creed, rushed out to his car and drove out the gates. He did not look happy.
Enda Kenny had played his cards very close to his chest, leaving it until the last minute to tell people whether they were out or in.
Donegal’s Joe McHugh, who sided with the Richard Bruton camp, was standing outside with his wife Olwyn Enright when a number of press office staff walked past on their way to the press conference.
“Congratulations, Joe!” called one of them.
“What did I get!” asked a breathless McHugh.
“Eh, the new baby,” came the reply. (Joe and Olwyn recently announced they are expecting their second child.)
There was an alarming crush of journalists and photographers outside the Wellington Room, waiting for the arrival of the happy politicians. They went in another door and settled themselves in their allotted seats before the perspiring hordes finally crowded in.
A number of experienced old hands were back in the frame. The likes of Noonan, Seán Barrett and John Perry were rehabilitated.
Back in 2007, when they were dropped, we wrote about Enda “ditching the dead wood”. Now, The Deadwood Stage was coming on over the hill and everyone was delighted. That’s politics.
The olive branch brigade beamed – Richard Bruton, the challenger at the top table with the big guns. He is now enterprise, jobs and economic planning spokesman. Has he confidence now in the man he tried to topple? “Absolutely,” said Bruton. “I’m really delighted about the role I’ve been asked to do.” He admitted the previous weeks have been “personally difficult” but rowed in behind the team.
New boy Frankie Feighan was overjoyed to get the nod in Community, Equality and Gaeltacht affairs. Although, like his predecessor Michael Ring, he doesn’t speak much Irish. The journalists began addressing him as “Proinsias” and he looked a bit bewildered.
Then Enda and the reporters from the Irish-language outlets began batting the breeze as Gaeilge about the new recruit. Frankie swivelled his head from other to other, rather like a dog who knows he’s being talked about but isn’t sure whether he’s going to get dinner, a walk or a visit to the vet.
“Afterwards, we’ll do some team photos outside beside the small lake,” said the press director, and the erstwhile but now onside conspirators shifted uneasily in their seats.
Enda would broach no more talk about heaves, or malcontents waiting in the long grass.
“In the Fine Gael of the future, there will be no long grass; it was all cut a few weeks ago,” he quipped.
Then it was outside for the family photo.
But there was one snap the photographers all wanted to have: former finance spokesman Bruton with new finance spokesman Noonan.
They duly obliged. As usual, the snappers wanted more, begging the pair to put their arms around each other again.
Noonan had enough.
“Aaah hang on there, it’s just a frontbench announcement, not a civil partnership!” But they left together, a civilised partnership.
Baldy, the Beast and the Baby Brute too.
This could be fun.
