'We were promised Action Man Enda but got Ken doll Kenny'

[C. Flower]

Does anyone know who writes Enda Kenny's speeches? There were some extraordinary outpourings early on after he became Taoiseach.

Phil Hogan is a wheeler dealer mainly. No vision there apart from turning over the next site for a few euros more. His personal strategy was to get Environment, which he now has.

Noonan is more serious altogether.

[Baron von Biffo]

I crossed paths with him twice in the 2000s when he was on his cross-country rebuild the party tours. He certainly had handlers, and had a bit of the look of a clockwork bunny that had been wound up and was going to keep going until it wound down, but the drive to keep moving forward visibly came from himself. On one occasion he left his schedule behind him and I took a look. It was a relentless round of small and medium encounters across townlands, parishes, villages and towns.

But that's just brute stamina. Go to the Junkie Derby in London in a few weeks and you'll see thousands of knuckle draggers who can do the same thing.

People wrote off Reagan as a fool, but he contributed to the bringing down of the USSR.

They were right to write Raygun off as a fool and I think it's wrong to give him credit for the collapse of the USSR.

Social conservatism is still a powerful force, not to be underestimated.

That's true but it doesn't mean that Gump has any great intellectual or ideological investment in it. He comes across like a farmer resistant to change saying 'it was good enough for my father and his father before him so it's good enough for me'.

[Baron von Biffo]

Does anyone know who writes Enda Kenny's speeches? There were some extraordinary outpourings early on after he became Taoiseach.

Phil Hogan is a wheeler dealer mainly. No vision there apart from turning over the next site for a few euros more. His personal strategy was to get Environment, which he now has.

Noonan is more serious altogether.

The only ones with any sort of vision in FG these days are the likes of Creighton, Harris and Varadkar. It might only extend to seeing Ireland as a as an impoverished peasant theme-park for holidaying Germans but it's more of a vision than Gump ever had.