Politics, Irish style

Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s overseas development minister, has a reputation for fucking things up. A few months ago, he called oriental persons of dusky skin “kebabs”. Before that, he caused embarrasment simply for existing. He’s probably a heavy breather.

I went along to a launch (a lunch/launch) in Mongo’s HQ of a book the organisation I’m working in has produced. Lenihan’s like a weird cross between a giant teddy-bear (you know, the ones you get in teddy-bear specialist shops) - well, no, he’s more like a man-boy. All man, still born. Uh… anywho, the thing was funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs so he had to make a little speech.

He said Ireland’s deadly at sending volunteers abroad, but now is the time to move away from fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants amateurism towards sort of commercial professionalism. The audience was a cabal of development representatives from Ireland like Concern and Oxfam. They found it hard enough to hear the teddy-bear suggesting the overseas volunteering in Ireland should become more commercialised - as if this isn’t part of the whole problem. At this stage, Lenihan was riffing, and riffing badly.

Then he actually said: “Maybe volunteering organisations should become more like McDonald’s than charities”. Or something like that.

There was no air left in the room for a few seconds. I couldn’t breathe. People’s gasps created such a vacuum, the walls bulged in. I was scared we were going to be crushed into a singularity until people started laughing under their breath. I could breathe again.

Could you think of a worse fucking example of the excesses of globalisation than McDonald’s? Is Lenihan insane, or just stupid? Ah, but he’s so adorable, can we not just keep him?

The same day, I heard an even better story about him. An early morning RTE radio show rang him up asking him to comment on some issue or other he obviously knew nothing about. He was in bed when RTE rang him and they asked him to stay on the line until they introduced him and brought him into the discussion. He probably wasn’t waiting long but when they went to him, live on air, all the presenter could hear was loud snoring, or gurgling, or burbling or something.

Presenter: “So, we now go Junior Minister of State Conor Lenihan, Mr. Lenihan, do you have anything to say about this?”
Conor: “NNNNNGGGGGHHHHKKKKKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.”

HAHA.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Dublin, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.