Re-invention proves the perfect vehicle for success

Date Published: 05-Dec-2012

The first car I ever owned by a Toyota Starlet which, before it came my way, had one careful collection of owners – the good Sisters at the Convent on Mercy in Galway city.

I was only learning to drive at the time, and as my old, long departed friend Francie Higgins once told me, relying on kangaroo fuel to get me from A to B – in other words, I was rather jumpy when it came to changing gears.

But the upside of purchasing a red Starlet previously owned by the nuns was that I was regularly saluted by members of the clergy on my trips in second gear around the city.

Unfortunately this was at a time where taking my hands off the steering wheel wasn’t an option, so belated apologies 25 years on are all that I can offer now.

I was once stopped by one of Galway’s nicest Guards – for a chat, I hasten to add, as opposed to a checkpoint – and that legend of local football Art Friel asked me where I got the car, so I told him the story to which he replied: “Well there’s one Starlet that has seen both sides of life now.”

What brought all of this to mind was a recent story which revealed that you could now hire out the Popemobile for stag parties or to get you to the Debs in something other than a stretch Hummer.

Never mind that this tarnishes one of the great abiding images of the seventies – of the Pope leading the field up the final furlong in front of the main stand in Ballybrit – it’s the notion that drunken bowsies will be waving at bewildered passers-by and shouting ‘Young people of Ireland, I love you’.

So if the Popemobile is no longer sacred, what else could we revamp and rent out – perhaps with a view to making inroads on our national debt?

What about the armoured car that Michael Collins was standing beside in Beal na mBlath when he was shot? Surely that would have a resonance for Fine Gaelers on their way to a wedding?

Could we lease out the Dail bar in Leinster House for stag parties – or would that raise the tone just a little too high for the current incumbents?

Is there a case to be made for digging out those e-voting machines so revellers could have a poll to decide who has to buy the next round at the bar?

What about turning Bertie’s old St Luke’s headquarters in Drumcondra into a theme park or party venue, where you hide wads of cash, held together with elastic bands, around the place and invite partygoers to find it and then open their own ‘bank account’?

Or best of all, couldn’t we rent out the Dail for three months of the summer, two months around Christmas and Easter and every weekend so that slobbery men in ill-fitting suits could shout insults at each other that make no sense to anyone, before heading off in a huff for a few drinks?

We could call it Oireachtas Report.

So there are loads of iconic buildings, vehicles and facilities that we could make money out of if we were only just as clever as businessman Paddy Dunning.

He acquired the Popemobile when he bought the Wax Museum some years ago from former Fianna Fail TD Donie Cassidy. Given the quality of the works in the Wax Museum, one might suggest Donie sold him a pup...or is that pup supposed to be Fungi?

But in any event, Paddy has given the iconic vehicle a €60,000 makeover and added a Mercedes chassis. The vehicle now has 15 seats, including the original “Pope’s chair” and he plans to charge up to €300 an hour plus VAT for use of it.

But Paddy is not confining himself to hen parties or stag dos either because he’s looking for a sponsor so that he can take it around the country as a ‘hopemobile’ – whatever the hell that is.

A sign of how far we’ve fallen since those halcyon days of 1979 in Ballybrit is that the recent showcase of the revamped, souped up Popemobile didn’t feature the Pope at all – instead it was paired with wax statues of those new Gods, Jedward, admired by no one more than the troublesome twosome themselves last week.Now if only they were actually waxworks.......

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.