Comical Ali not a patch on Ditsy Derek
Bradley Bytes – a sort of political column by Dara Bradley
Derek Nolan, the Labour Party Galway West TD, must’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed last Tuesday.
And then he stubbed his toe on something sharp as he hopped out of bed.
And then he banged his head off the pointed corner edge of a press.
Things then went downhill when he glanced at the headline on the front page of the Connacht Sentinel, which accompanied a story that predicted Labour might do poorly in Friday’s local elections, and that the party was battling to hold four of its five seats that were at risk.
Derek’s face turned as red as the hairs on his head.
Rather than contact the Sentinel, puce with rage, Ditsy Derek rang Galway Bay FM to complain to Galway Talks’ presenter Keith Finnegan that a newspaper had the audacity to speculate or predict what might happen in an election.
Evidently it was news to Derek, the party’s director of elections in the city, that things weren’t so rosy for Labour; and that the red rose was wilting among city voters.
Maybe that’s because the weekend before the vote, instead of canvassing for hard-working colleagues Nuala Nolan and Collette Connolly et al, the city Director of Elections was out in Connemara.
We kid you not – Labour’s city vote was imploding, with widespread implications for his own Dáil seat down the line, and Derek was out frolicking in the hills of Connemara.
But we digress.
In a calamitous interview, Derek’s panicked tone encapsulated in those five minutes of broadcasting the complete disarray the party was in four days out from polling day.
Dripping in desperation, Derek’s pathetic high-pitched performance – in which he attempted to shoot the messenger with a scatter-gun approach – proved, by accident, the substance of the article he was raging against: Labour were in trouble, and it showed in his voice.
It was the single biggest on-air, live hissy fit from an elected representative of Dáil Éireann since his ministerial Labour colleague Pat Rabbitte likened Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell to a “menopausal Paris Hilton” on Prime Time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.