Faithful dine in `house of saints'

Bertie Ahern has persistently quashed suggestions that he will be going to the country anytime soon. He took a big step in that direction last night, however, when he hosted the Taoiseach's dinner at a hotel several miles outside Dublin on the road to Naas.

Long an annual fixture at the Burlington, this year's staging at the City West in Saggart broke records as well as new ground.

Warm-up speaker Ben Briscoe put the attendance at 2,060 and claimed it was the "biggest gathering ever in a hotel". It was hard to argue with him. It was also hard to hear him, because all 2,060 people were talking at the time.

The event mirrored the success of the economy, and some of the problems caused by it. Even with Garda help it took 25 minutes for traffic to negotiate the few hundred yards between the dual carriageway and the venue. Not to mention any opposition billboard campaign in particular, but progress was definitely sluggish.

Undaunted by this, the Taoiseach predictably followed the snail trail, albeit in a roundabout way. At the pre-dinner reception, as press photographers hoved in on a possible picture of him standing alongside taxi-rebel Willie O'Dea, he had thwarted them with a sudden lurch to the left. And he seemed to be continuing in that direction when he attacked the "rich capitalist" friends who had paid for Fine Gael's billboards.

But the transformation into Chairman Bertie was a ruse. As he spoke of how Fianna Fail's supporters were sitting down to a "modest" dinner in "modest" surroundings, we realised he was being ironic. Fianna Fail had more capitalist friends than Fine Gael had ever had hot dinners was the message, and the fat cats in his audience purred approval.

Showing admirable restraint, the organisers did not include escargots on the menu. Ireland may be fast changing but not so fast that the Fianna Fail grassroots would eat snails, even to annoy the Blueshirts. The dinnear mor, as the Taoiseach called it in the Irish section of his speech, stuck with soup and sirloin steak.

The Taoiseach delighted in the event's new location. Saggart was Irish for "house of saints," he said, adding: "As we dine here tonight along the old border of the Pale and the rebel Irish territories, we can forget about attack from political billboards."