#VINB has soft spot for Queen of the Claddagh

Vincent Browne has a crush on Catherine Connolly. There – we said it. You were all thinking it. Just afraid to say it.

Well now that it’s out in the open, we can all stop feeling so awkward about it. And move on and just watch the Tonight with Vincent Browne programme in, ahem, comfort.

He’s the most curmudgeonly of cranks at the best of times, but the bould Vincent always has a twinkle in his eye when Catherine, the Claddagh Queen, is on his late-night current affairs show.

Which is almost every other night since Catherine was elected to Dáil Éireann.

If she’s not ‘live’ on the panel, he’s replaying her contributions, using video clips, from the Dáil earlier that day.

Don’t get us wrong. The crush isn’t a sexual thing. It’s more like a man-crush, except for the obvious – Catherine isn’t a man.

Maybe it’s a mutual-admiration barrister thing. Or maybe it’s the novelty factor with Catherine, and he’s getting tired of Clare Daly.

But Vincent certainly has such a soft spot for her. It’s obvious because the TV3 presenter just listens when she speaks, something ordinarily he’s incapable of doing with some other guests.

He gets all light-hearted, too, when she’s giving it socks with left-wing rhetoric.

Watch out, though Catherine, watch out. It’ll never last. And when he turns, it’ll be forever immortalised on YouTube.

No cliché is safe

Political speech writers are predisposed to use of cliché.

They leave no stone unturned in digging up clichés for speeches. It’s their Achilles heel. They probably cost an arm and a leg, too, but at the end of the day, speech writers are as useful as tits on a bull.

For some political speech writers, clichés are all in a day’s work. For others, all’s fair in love and war . . . and clichés are fair game, and all that jazz. Speech writers know that actions speak louder than words, and that’s the ace up their sleeve. They also know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and so they like to go out and paint the town red but never air their dirty laundry in public.

The clichés make some as sick as a parrot. But even though an apple a day keeps the doctor away, some of them always look on the bright side and find that as long as they’re as honest as the day is long, that’s as good as it gets.

For some politicians, all’s well that ends well and they’re happy to employ cliché-prone speech writers – after all, any port in a storm.

There must have been all hands on deck with them last week, what with all the speeches that were made.

On Sunday, Arts Minister, Heather Humphreys, described the Arts Festival as Galway’s “jewel in the crown”.

Great minds think alike and all that except Noel Larkin, our new city mayor, thought the Festival was Galway’s “crown in the jewel”.

With all due respect to their respective speech writers, their clichés are the elephant in the room. Perhaps it’s time they went back to the drawing board.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.