In the process of wondering about Wagner, and the coolness of Black Dog by Led Zeppelin on Love/Hate, I had an image of lovable psycho-scalawag Nidge sitting in the place of Brian Hayes with John Crown giving out ad nauseum, before Minister Nidge-Weasel launches into his speech about not giving a toss about any of them ("I don't give a shit about any of them...I love Trish, n' all, but...").
There he's sat in the Seanad chamber, our Minister (sorry...JUNIOR Minister. By the way, why is minister even capitalised?) telling John-Boy Crown he likes to lick himself at night. Cue the outrage and the pompous defending of comments in the subsequent non-news cycle. You wonder why they would abolish the Seanad.
I still believe in its current form, the Seanad's one redeeming feature is it has the possibility of circumventing the parish pumpery of the lower house. By allowing panels of candidates to be elected by varied interests, like the colleges, you give an in to politics for the voices in a society instinctively suspicious of the educated as Ireland. The Seanad is, however, only as good as its members, and this is no golden age of parliamentarians. There's no WB Yeats or Mary Robinson sitting in those smurf-arse blue Bargain Town dining room chairs.
Sending Hayes in to rile the few Senators present with his iPad and his street-style 'tude has its own delicious irony. He's no Yeats and he's definitely no Robinson. What he represents in politics is the piggy for whom one end of the trough used to be as good enough as the other. When he wasn't good enough for his constituency, where did he find safe harbour? Hayes obviously doesn't think he needs them anymore. All trapeze artists think they don't need the net until they half way down and wondering what will stop them smashing into the dirt.
If politics is a theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk, then Hayes is Alberich in Das Rheingold: he's renounced love and will steal their gold. The Rhein maidens, who I assume are Fidelma Healy-Eames and Ivana Bacik in blondie-Fraeulein wigs, are warbling their distress to Pat Kenny, who in this case is Wotan, having the giant Denis build him Valhalla in a Dublin 2 office block behind a Sally Army hostel. The production is only marginally worse than this year's Bayreuth, and the score's been switched with a Big Tom chord book.
I want my money back. I love politics 'n' all, but...
