"CLEVER Dick", "Spicy Dick", "King Dick", "Calamity Dick", "Tricky Dick", "Chicken Dick" - the Tanaiste was served up in every flavour and variety by Brian Cowen in the warm-up speech to 4,000 hungry delegates.
Nothing buoyed up this Fianna Fail Ardfheis like the rollicking full-frontal assault on the Labour leader, delivered by the party's own live-in storm-trooper.
Last year, the UUP deputy leader, John Taylor, described Mr Spring as the most despised politician in Northern Ireland. Fianna Fail now gives Spring a similar rating in Dail politics.
He is the Taoiseach, the real Taoiseach, said Brian Cowen.
Mr Spring believed he has acquired squatters' rights to the Merc. He has made "a right ass out of the Taoiseach's office".
It is Dick that will call the election, not John - "Dick's dummy". Spring's "verbally incontinent" Minister of State, Joan Burton, had let it slip that the election was five weeks away; Labour's idea of family values meant "jobs for the boys and girls; transparency meant pulling down the shutters on the greatest health scandal in the history of the State..."
When he had finished mauling Dick, he turned to Ivan Yates, "Ivan the Terrible", whose head was so big he could sit on a bar stool in Wexford and still have a gun held to it by a Russian in Dublin Airport.
That reduced his audience to a shaking mass of merriment. But there was more.
What about Nora? She had transformed the Justice Department to a workshop in crisis management".
And Democratic Left? Proinsias and his lot had a philosophy that ran no deeper than the dip-stick in the State car.
"Fianna Fail has more members than Democratic Left has voters," roared Brian.
They loved that bit too. They were on their feet clapping and shouting approval, galvanised in their dislike of Dick and exhilarated by their boy's ability to dust down the high and mighty.
He was not there to hear it. In fact, there was nobody from Kinsealy to be seen all weekend.
But one got the feeling that, had Charlie Haughey walked into the RDS at that moment, when Brian Cowen had concluded his mauling, he too would have got a standing ovation.
Of course Bertie had done the right thing to cut the rope bridge with the past. He had no option, they said. But, there was a kind of sympathetic feeling among delegates for Mr Haughey.
"Well, you see," said one of them. "He would have done what Bertie has had to do. No question."