“It’s like the Oasis reunion. One night only!” is how former Fine Gael TD and minister for Europe, Lucinda Creighton, captions a photograph she put on Instagram this week.
It was taken at Wednesday’s Sutherland Leadership Award dinner in Dublin and shows Lucinda, who now runs a successful public affairs consultancy, smiling for the camera with Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe and former minister for finance Michael Noonan.
Readers might recall some of the group’s more famous hits including Wonderwall Street, Don’t Pay Tax in Anger, Cigarettes and Alcohol Go Up Again, You Gotta Toll With It and Champagne Supper No VAT.
Lucinda is looking very glam in a black off-the-shoulder evening gown, while Fine Gael’s non-feuding version of the Gallagher brothers – which one is Liam and which one is Noel? – look very smart in their tuxes.
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This annual awards dinner is part of the Business & Finance Awards Programme in association with KPMG, and more than 600 guests from across business, politics, and public life gathered in UCD’s O’Reilly Hall to toast this year’s recipient, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde.
Former honorees include Ursula von der Leyen, Mario Draghi, Louise Richardson, Nick Clegg, Manual Barroso and Nancy Pelosi.
It was quite the love-in when Christine delivered her acceptance speech.
“Dear Minister Donohoe, my dear Pas-Kal. Dear Other Finance Minister, my dear Michael. Dear Commissioner McGuinness, dear Mairead. Ambassadors, excellencies, dear Governor Makhlouf – mon cher Gabriel. Dear Executive Board Member, my Chief Economist, mon cher, Philip.”
That last two would be Gabriel Makhlouf, governor of the Central Bank, and Philip Lane, former governor and now an ECB board member.
“Thank you for him,” Christine said to her mainly Irish audience, who were far too well behaved to shout back “you’re welcome to him!” for the craic.
Pas-Kal went big on the style for the occasion, wearing a velvet dickie-bow and velvet dinner jacket. Apparently velvet is in this season. He’ll lose the run of himself if he doesn’t watch it.
Business & Finance publisher Ian Hyland presented the guest of honour with a rare copy of Ulysses.
In his speech, Dear Pas-Kal didn’t quote Joyce. This time.
Instead, he reached for an old reliable, but from a different angle. “While no evening is complete without a Seamus Heaney poem or reference”, the Minister for Finance chose to quote from a Heaney translation of a poem by Ana Blandiana and apply it to the ECB president.
“The shadows of words
Are what I hunted –
And hunting these is a skill
Best learned from the elders.
The elders know
That nothing is more precious
In a word
Than the shadow it casts”
He continued: “This is relevant to the work president Lagarde does on our behalf. Except she doesn’t look to dispel them. And in her work in the financial markets...”
Cabinet meetings must be great fun.
On a night when business and political minds were concentrated on an imminent event in the White House, Mme Lagarde’s keynote address on global financial leadership and multilateral co-operation was very appropriate.
Paschal, meanwhile, grasped the nettle at the start of his speech.
“As the evening proceeds, some of us might get the temptation to check on what’s happening in another part of the world, to check on what announcements are being made... your phone may begin to buzz.”
If that were to happen, he asked people to pause for a moment and reflect before they checked.
In Ireland and Europe, “Let us focus on our actions, and above all, let us not be distracted. Let us not be lured by causes that can divide. Instead, let us look at what we can do that can unite us.”
Let us call that a work in progress.
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Formers’ Morkets.
Did our eyes deceive us?
Was that Fine Gael’s Dublin 4 blue blood James Geoghegan on his feet during Wednesday afternoon’s Questions to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine?
Maybe he wanted to ask about an outbreak of foot-in-mouth in Ranelagh. Or dwindling haddock stocks in Herbert Park pond. Or country people bringing their sheep to graze on Sandymount Green.
As he rose to his feet, the mostly rural-based deputies who normally populate the sunlit uplands of Ag Questions observed this horny-handed son of Clonskeagh with mild interest.
Probably thinking that lawyer James, son of two Supreme Court judges and a former lord mayor of Dublin, left all the gates open on his way into the chamber while his unleashed Labracockacavapoo chased ewes (not “yoes”) up and down Kildare Street.
Deputy Geoghegan came in for the segment on the organic food industry.
“You mightn’t see me here much but this is an issue of interest to me. And really, it’s about the farm-to-fork philosophy.” He wanted to know whether the “very successful food fair run in Merrion Square last year” would be funded again this year.
Minister of State Noel Grealish replied. As a member of the Udders group of Regional Independents whose Government-supporting but Opposition-inclined members want bread buttered on both sides, a food-related portfolio is ideal.
Noel declared himself a great supporter of farmers’ markets before rattling off a departmental script saying he didn’t know if any Dublin-based food fairs would be getting funding.
“It’s great to hear a Dublin TD talking about the farmers’ market, which I think is very important. I know I spoke about this before in the Dáil, in my first speech, where a number of the TDs from Dublin were talking about the farming community.”
The world is gone mad.
James wants to see more of these markets, not just in Dublin, but all over the country.
“A lot of the people who are attending those parks to sell their goods are selling organic produce and perhaps there is more the department could do to fund smaller projects like that.”
The Minister of State sounded very enthusiastic.
“I came back from Vietnam recently and there is a market on every street. It is maybe something we could see if we could grow more here.”
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The townies are taking over.
Fianna Fáil’s Malcolm Byrne, from the metropolis of Gorey, came into Agriculture Questions to extol the wonders of Wexford wine.
‘Indeed, just outside my hometown of Gorey, La Kav vineyard is producing some very fine wines. The Ceann Comhairle will know about the Old Roots vineyard, not far from herself, which is producing some very fine wines’
— Malcolm Byrne, Fianna Fáil
He wanted to know the Minister’s views on the development of wine production in Ireland and the details of supports available to growers.
Noel Grealish extracted another long answer prepared by civil servants and read it at speed, rarely lifting his head from the script.
“The capital investment scheme is intended to assist in increasing innovation and diversification in horticulture with grant aid in capital investment and specialised plant and equipment to microenterprises and SMEs active in primary horticulture production. A number of vine growers have been supported under this scheme in the past...”
And so on.
Malcolm, a TD for Wicklow-Wexford, thinks Irish wine has a big future.
“Unfortunately, or fortunately, because of climate change, the possibilities to be able to make wine in Ireland have become more extensive. We are fortunate that parts of the country have a similar terroir, or soil type, to parts of northern France,” he informed the Dáil.
“Indeed, just outside my hometown of Gorey, La Kav vineyard is producing some very fine wines. The Ceann Comhairle will know about the Old Roots vineyard, not far from herself, which is producing some very fine wines.
“You have me there!” admitted Verona Murphy, with a guilty grin.
It’s a pity Malcolm didn’t bring along a few samples.
But he was pleased by the Minister’s assurances that his department continues to monitor the pace of, er, growth in the sector.
“And I’d only be too delighted, Deputy, if you had anyone that you want to bring in to meet with me, I’d sit down with them and discuss this and if there is any help or support we can give them, we definitely will,” promised Noel.
Sure he’d even bring along a few friends...
But the department is taking all of this very seriously.
“It is important to note that my officials participated in the European Commission high-level wine group last year.”
That must have been a terrible chore.
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And finally, back to the indefatigable Paschal Donohoe, who has had a very busy week, and that’s not even counting the Trump Tariffs shocker.
He was in the Mansion House on Monday evening to launch a special issue of the venerable journal Studies to mark the centenary of the Boundary Commission.
Needless to say, Paschal is one of the contributors, as is Taoiseach Micheál Martin, along with a raft of historians and pundits including Irish Times columnists John FitzGerald and Stephen Collins.
It’s a right rip-roaring rollicking aul read.
Or maybe not.
In the opening essay, Micheál remembers the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon, just months before his death, saying, “When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place?” It was his reflections on this question that led to the Shared Island Initiative, which he launched in 2020.
This is not the first time Paschal has written for Studies. On the bookcase behind his desk in the Department of Finance he has a collection of every edition of the quarterly journal going back to 2008 when he first contributed to it.
The quarterly journal has been going since 1912 and the Minister for Finance pointed out that the current issue, the 435th edition, has kept up the standard of close attentiveness to the complexity of the big issues that confront us.
He described the journal as “a plucky, wise and resilient companion in our journeys of attentiveness. She is needed more than ever.”
Fast forward to Thursday, when the Minister for Finance was down to take questions first thing in the Dáil on the morning after Trump’s bonkers tariff press conference on the White House’s Rose Lawn.
He bustled in five minutes early. Except he was eight minutes late.
One of the results of the Speaking Rights row has been the rejigging of the Dáil schedule to allow Government TDs questions Government Ministers in time slots traditionally the preserve of Opposition TDs.
Paschal was late because that slot has gone from 90 minutes in length to 96.5 minutes to accommodate one of the “Other Members”. From now on, Priority Questions start at 8:47am, so Leaders’ Questions can still go ahead at noon.
