Touchy-thumpy Taoiseach too cosy with Sarkozy for prim Adams

SKETCH:THAT GERRY Adams is easily sickened.

Take Monday in Brussels. One man gives another a robust thwack behind the ear and poor Gerry gets a fit of the vapours.

Even the mildest scenes of violence make him queasy.

The Sinn Féin leader must have led a very sheltered life in west Belfast.

Then there are the scenes of an adult nature. Kissing, and stuff. He wouldn’t be able for that at all.

So it’s just as well it’s Enda we’re sending to the EU summits, because there’s nothing the Taoiseach likes better than a bit of manly bonding. He doesn’t feel embarrassed when a French president greets him with a friendly peck on the cheek or a collegiate clip across the ear.

Gerry, on the other hand, is scandalised by such behaviour.

Rumour has it in earlier days he was very insistent chair legs and the like be covered up and out of sight when visitors called to the Falls Road.

No. Deputy Adams would never cut it with the continentals. (Except, maybe, the Basques.) Whereas Enda Kenny is very touchy-feely.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

It would be more accurate to say our Taoiseach, as the legions of the slightly bruised all over Ireland will testify, is very touchy-thumpy.

We recall a young colleague who met him during the closing stages of the general election, when Enda was on a roll and fizzing with energy: he greeted her like a long-lost friend and gave her an unmerciful belt in the back.

“I nearly coughed up a lung,” she declared.

One imagines Enda would go down a treat with our more tactile European neighbours. And that, indeed, seems to be the case.

Should that be a problem? It is, if his peers view him more like a Labrador puppy – boisterous, affectionate but useless at negotiating – than a serious head of government.

That’s how Gerry Adams sees it. And Joe Higgins is similarly concerned.

Gerry told Enda during Leader’s Questions he saw him on television being “buddy buddy” with President Sarkozy and was sickened by how foolish the Taoiseach had looked.

Sickened, no less. And he made his point in Irish, to drive home his disgust.

And this “at a summit which noted 23 million people are out of work across the EU” quivered Reverend Mother Adams, before turning to the Taoiseach and tut-tutting: “agus tusa ag imirt an amadán le Sarkozy!” (For non-Irish speakers, this means “and you playing the fool with Sarkozy!”)

Enda was in no mood for a lecture from Gerry about the appropriateness or otherwise of manly bonding in Brussels.

The Sinn Féin leader had some cheek coming into the Dáil and talking about him meeting people “when you yourself were buddy buddy with some very shadowy creatures over the last 30 years”, said the Taoiseach.

“At least the French president is elected democratically by his people, and everybody who attends at that meeting is quite entitled to give good wishes, or whatever, to everybody that they meet there because we have to work together in the interests of Europe . . .”

It was the “whatever” that caught our attention. Gerry had the look of a man reciting a decade of the Rosary in his head.

How dare Deputy Adams “come here to this House where you have been elected democratically yourself and accuse anybody else of being buddy-buddy,” bridled Enda.

At least everyone knows he had “an altercation” with the French president at a previous summit and knows he had “a very convivial conversation” with him at Monday’s one.

“But you, sir, you, sir, have never owned up to some of the buddy-buddy creatures you associated with in the last 30 years.” And now Deputy Adams wants to come into Leinster House and makes a big issue of something “just because the French president passes by and says ‘hello’ in his own way.”

Ah, yes. In his own way. That was why Brian Cowen always looked terrified meeting Sarkozy – you could sense he was waiting to be gripped warmly by the shoulders and kissed on both cheeks, in mortal dread of the photos.

Gerry stuck to his guns.

“I just think it’s inappropriate for a Taoiseach to act like an eejit when he meets the French president,” he grumbled.

It came as no surprise when Joe Higgins made it plain he too was appalled by the sight of the Taoiseach gambolling around the summit, making friends with his peers. Deputy Higgins also painted a picture of Enda, the loveable golden Labrador, anxious to please.

“Is it any wonder there would be photographs all over the media . . . of Mr Sarkozy patting the Irish prime minister on the head?” he asked, indicating Ireland had sold itself to Europe in return for perpetual austerity.

“And indeed I notice in some of the TV shots that a number of other prime ministers patted you on the head as they passed you by.”

The Taoiseach looked a bit stung, even a little embarrassed.

A witness tells us “Sarkozy started it” in a playful effort to get his retaliation in first. At least they’re talking. Lighten up, Gerry and Joe.