COLUMN: Canny Fox gets lions' share of Tiger's feast
Last week, on the front of the Racing Post, Joe Farrell was the Grand National flavour of the day. The Rebecca Curtis-trained horse was being talked up by the racing paper, and by the weekend, lots of commentators were fancying the Welsh runner too.
But by Sunday evening it became apparent that it wasn’t Joe Farrell that had won the big race at Aintree, but Joe Fox. At the homecoming celebrations in Summerhill, Joe appeared out of a horsebox with Michael O’Leary. He appeared out of a Land Rover with the Grand National Trophy.
Joe Fox with the Randox Aintree Grand National Trophy, and a local young lad, Gordon Elliott.
He led the parade up the street with leading jockeys and trainers. His racing colours were unmissable – high viz silks that could be picked up by every television camera and newspaper photographer that had descended on the village square to record the second coming.
Never since Charlie Haughey won the Tour de France on the Champs Elysees in Paris in 1987 had there been such joy. There’s already talk of a statue on the green.
The Dublin Corpo lads used get an awful slagging. Lads lying on their shovels, looking into a hole and all that. But they were certainly busy last Saturday week.
It must have been the environmental patrol section, out on Clonliffe Road making sure that all the country bumpkins up for the National League games in Croke Park weren’t littering the place. And they found one culprit. Cavan weren’t playing, but one Cavan man was shimmying up lamp posts, trying to get a good view. And the Corpo boys weren’t having it.
Fianna Fail Cavan TD, Brendan Smith, graced the lamp posts of Dublin 3 with European Election posters. This officially was littering, as posters cannot be erected officially for the elections until 24th April, by ministerial order. Up went the Corpo boys with their snippers, and down came Brendan.
We could do with some of them snipers - oops, sorry, snippers – in Navan to take down the plethora of posters littering the town!
Poster Boys ... Thomas Byrne TD, Cllr Stephen McKee, and aspiring MEP, Brendan Smith TD.
Ratoath area councillor for Fianna Fail, Damien O’Reilly, was canvassing around Dunsany recently. He dropped a canvass card which described how he was ‘working with Shane Cassells TD’.
Strange, because most of Cllr Reilly’s municipal area is in Meath East, and Deputy Cassells is the FF TD for Meath West. The only places the two cross over are Kiltale and Kilmessan, and Dunsany falls into Meath East. Perhaps Cllr O’Reilly had run of out Eastern leaflets by the time he crossed the Dáil constituency boundaries!
Who’s in the driving seat? ‘Tis a question often asked of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail in these days of ‘confidence and supply’. Clearly, in this picture taken by Seamus Farrelly at the launch of the ‘Dear Dot’ exhibition in Trim, Minister Damien English is in the driving seat. But then, it’s a left-hand drive. Deputy Shane Cassells probably think’s he’s in the driving seat. The question is, who’s steering?