Party gatherings – more drinking than thinking

Whenever anyone asks me to define an oxymoron, I reply: "A parliamentary party think-in".

I don't know who came up with the phrase but it's so wide of the mark that you can be sure that Hawkeye will never be pressed into service.

Anyway we are stuck with the title even though there is very little thinking, though quite a bit (but not as much anymore) of imbibing, an activity which strangely enough rhymes with thinking.

The think-ins are a relatively modern phenomenon and only came into being in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

The first one I remember covering was a Fine Gael one in Killarney in September 2003. It was a very civilised affair and reminded you a little of the Fianna Fáil ones nowadays.

That was because Fine Gael had taken a fierce hammering in the 2002 election and its parliamentary party was much depleted. The big thing to emerge was a paper from Richard Bruton warning that benchmarking was going to end up costing the State over €1 billion.

He was not right. It actually ended up costing the State far more than that. It was a shoddy, unaudited and loose arrangement that was supposed to give pay parity between the public and private sectors. What happened ultimately is that the public sector raced ahead of the private sector in salaries. The deals were shrouded in secrecy.

And the quid pro quo of more productivity and flexibility never materialised in any real sense. Essentially if you were a public servant who was able to turn up at work, that seemed to fulfil the criteria. The two most remembered are to do with Fianna Fáil. The first was the one held in West Cork in 2004 in the Inchdoney Lodge.

There, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced a new strategy for the party and promised to take it to the left, to have a more 'caring and sharing' image after several years of Gordon Gekko  'loadsamoney' grasping in Irish society.

That was bolstered by the presence of key speaker, Fr Sean Healy of Social Justice Ireland. That new Fianna Fáil never materialised then. The irony is that because of necessity it might just materialise now.

The second memorable one for Fianna Fáil was also, unfortunately for it, its most notorious. That was in 2010 when the economy and State was in tailspin. The party – which had just not copped on to the extent of its disaster – held its think-in in the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway. Brian Cowen was already struggling with the responsibility of the role of Taoiseach. And on the first night of the conference he stayed up until the early hours of the morning with a group of buddies – as well as journalists, it must be said, who were quite happy to see him there. It culminated with him doing a couple of mimic impressions which had his audience in stitches.

Sadly, his next turn the following morning was to do an impression of a very hungover Taoiseach when he appeared on Morning Ireland and struggled to collect his thoughts. A Simon Coveney tweet suggesting the same allowed journalists to get their foot in the jamb of the door.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.