THE Government is hoping desperately that Quinngate will go away. It may not. The Opposition - FF and the PDs - has tabled a series of questions to John Bruton, Dick Spring, Ruairi Quinn and Mervyn. Taylor. Unless emergency questions are allowed, Mr Spring and Mr Taylor are not due to answer. until well into February. That's a long time for a question to hang. Remember Michael Lowry this summer?
Meanwhile, FF members are delighted with themselves. A political controversy is again in court. Instead of FF and the beef tribunal, it is Labour and Quinngate. Fergus Finlay, who FF blames for ousting them from government, is in the thick of it and FF is relishing every minute. What, they want to know, was his role in awarding the contract?
But there are other questions. Is Conor Quinn, who was a FF member in Dun Laoghaire for many years and a foot soldier for David Andrews, going through all the grief without any of the reward?
It will be remembered that the Government tried, and failed, to get a supplementary estimate through the Dail just before the November referendum. At that stage Equality and Law Reform was saying that QMP had not been paid. Has the agency been paid now that the whole thing is in the High Court?
And why did McConnell's advertising agency fail with its tender? MD John Fanning has many close Labour friends and word has it that he thought he had the lucrative contract too. Hence the early Labour attempt to get the two agencies to work together.
Dry Martini
THE man tipped as the next Pope, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, will be in Ireland next week and Quidnunc hopes his visit to St Anne's Church of Ireland Cathedral in Belfast does not attract the sort of attack endured by the last Cardinal to speak there. Leo Josef Suenens of Brussels in 1986.
On that occasion. Ian Paisley wrote to the Dean at St Anne's accusing the cardinal of having presided over a 1970 Catholic theological congress in Brussels, largely attended by young women, which had turned into a celebration of sexual potency and fertility worship. Paisley claimed that after dancing and a feast of wine and cigarettes it deteriorated into outright obscenity. On the altar, he wrote, "something was beginning to rise and take on an unbelievable shape. It was first greeted with gasps then giggles, and finally pandemonium broke loose as the transparent plastic forming the shape was seen to represent a gigantic penis."
The explanation for this "amazing exhibition of carnal tomfoolery", Paisley continued, was the perfidy of Rome and Suensens, like the Pope, was not a Christian at all but a master of a heathen temple where "atavistic rites, all with sexual undertones, take the place of religion".
There was much more of the same but Quidnunc will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that when the cardinal arrived three days later he was greeted by 250 noisy and abusive placard-waving Free Presbyterians.
Cardinal Martini, who is a guest of Cardinal Cahal Daly, arrives in Belfast on Tuesday. He will address the Greenhills Ecumenical Conference in Co Louth on Wednesday and later that evening will speak in Armagh Cathedral.
Tuesday child
THIS year's Budget is on a Tuesday instead of the usual Wednesday because next Wednesday the Taoiseach John Bruton travels to Strasbourg to address the Council of Europe. Consequently, Deputies are being brought back a day early from their Christmas hols. Wednesday is expected to be reinstated next year, if there is a Budget next year.
Time was when Irish Ministers for Finance aped the British chancellors of the exchequer and appeared on Budget Day with a smiling wife in one hand and a bulging briefcase in the other. Not any more. Albert Reynolds, who appeared with his family, may have been the last. Bertie Ahern posed with his daughters and briefcase. Ruairi Quinn faced the cameras last year without either wife or briefcase. And he will be doing the same next Tuesday. He will pose alone, or with a secretary, with his speech in its folder in the new Department of Finance cafeteria in Merrion Street in the morning and then walk down the street for the photographers in the afternoon. Oh the excitement of it all.
Hume: the book
IN gratitude for the help he gave her when she was finding her feet as an MEP two years ago. Bernie Malone threw a small dinner party for the 59th birthday of her socialist colleague, John Hume, in Strasbourg on Wednesday. In the restaurant "Mille Pates" or "One Thousand Pastas" Bernie said. tongue-in-cheek that she was hereby launching John's campaign for the presidency after the President, Mrs Robinson steps down. It was no surprise when the Derryman replied that last time he had been approached by all the political parties to be a candidate but had turned them dawn. He said nothing about the next time.
Hume had mixed feelings about starting his 60th year but is hardly brooding as he is correcting the proofs of his autobiography. Approached last year by US-publisher Rhinehart-Roberts, Hume said he just hadn't the time but he did spend a weekend talking into a tape-recorder and the result is a 160-page book edited into the different phases of his life. It is due out. mainly for an American audience, by St Patrick's Day.
Will there be revelations? Hume looked surprised by the question. "No," he said.
Time heels all
THE FF frontbencher Maire Geoghegan-Quinn will not be attending the Budget speech in Leinster House on Tuesday. There are too many stairs, she says. In fact since she broke her ankle while dancing at an FF party in the House the week before Christmas been able to do very independent and to doing things tar themselves it is a very humbling experience to be totally dependent on others. I'm impatient, fed up and miserable, she told Quidnunc from her home in Galway this week.
It is the second time she has had trouble with an ankle. While opening the community games in Mosney in 1982 she tripped on a rabbit hole and was to weeks in plaster. She didn't sue then, she said, even though it was on private property but she knows what she has suffered since and on this occasion will wait until the cast is off and the prognosis is given before she decides whether or not.to sue the Leinster House authorities for her tall. Meanwhile she still has the State car. Former Ministers for Justice as Maire is often get to keep it longer than the usual year after leaving office and the current Minister, Nora Owens is leaving it with her for the time being.
On Tuesday week the plaster comes off, there will be an X-ray and she may be able to move about again. In the meantime, "I'm just at home." But she is working on the political diary she has been keeping for 20 years. When you are away from politics, she says, you can look at the situation more clearly. So it is most certainly up to date. No wonder some quake at the prospect.
Gay gathering
THE Ceann Comhairle's Oireachtas Committee on Procedure and Privileges may have rejected the Late Late Show's proposal to have the entire Dail in the Montrose studio debating current issues as "wholly inappropriate and out of keeping with the constitutional status and dignity of our parliament" but the show is going ahead next Friday nonetheless. Instead of all 166 Deputies, producer John Masterson is now approaching the party whips to provide up to 30 TDs from all parties to argue about Ireland as we know it today with members of the public who feel it is in a bad way. It is likely he will find this number. In addition, he intends to ask the party leaders to appear and is prepared to discuss special arrangements so they do not have to sit, as their colleagues will, in the body at the audience.
Bland the man
IRELAND, it would most definitely appear, now has a great friend at the mighty BBC. Sir Christopher Bland, who takes over from Marmaduke Hussey as chairman in April, has longstanding Irish connections and current interests. Although born in Japan, his family was originally from Sneem in Co Kerry and he has cousins in Laois. His family came to Ireland at the end of the 17th century, he told Quidnunc, and left at the beginning of this one. He was bought up in Saintfield, Co Down, was a member of the Irish Olympic fencing team in 1960 and once unsuccessfully applied to Bertie Smyllie for a job in The Irish Times. He has just left Oxford, he said, and was looking for something "with lots of glamour and no work".
He is, as he says himself, a keen member of the British Irish Association and, as others say, one of their most successful fund-raisers.
Feely factor
NOT only is Frank Feely, the city manager, leaving Dublin Corporation but Noel Carroll, public relations officer and athlete, is going too. He becomes chief executive of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce next month. The departures are coincidental.
Noel Carroll, the first and still only local authority PRO in the country, took up the post in 1972 when there was neither a lord mayor nor a city council as the Minister Kevin Boland had dismissed them for failing to strike a rate. He has served under 24 lord mayors, from Frank Cluskey to Sean etc Loftus and three city managers, Matt Macken, Jimmy Molloy and Frank Feely. He has been involved at the highest level he says with a quarter of a century of modern Dublin. "Now it is going through a golden era and it is heartening to think and feel you were in the thick of it."
In his years at City Hall he has met all the visiting dignitaries from kings and queens to movie and pop stars and sports personalities because he organised the civic receptions and the protocol. They were the good times. The difficult times were "some fierce controversies" involving housing, strikes, snow, roads, floods, evictions and Wood Quay which caused a lot of grief".
Noel says he got on extremely well with all the lord mayors and city managers in spite of the delicate balance between the administrative and the political. "But it is great being a non drinker because at the functions and receptions I had to organise and I could do it with a clear head. And you have no conscience about closing a bar. It was a bonus the corpo got and they didn't realise it."
Terrymandering
MANY will be pleased to hear that the affable Terry Steward, formerly head of the European Commission office in Dublin, is returning to Ireland. After several years in a top job at the social affairs directorate in Brussels, he is now expected to take over as director general of the Institute of European Affairs in time for our accession to the EU Presidency. He will also take on. the chair of the Intergovernmental Conference on July 1st. He succeeds Brian Farrell,
Galway races
THE race to succeed Colm O hEocha as president of UCG is hotting up. By closing date last week there were no fewer than seven insider applicants and an unknown number from outside. Remarkably, all seven known suitors are scientists but, less remarkably in higher education here, they're all male. The favourite is thought to be the registrar, Matt McCarthy, though rival camps are countering his campaign.
Other highly-placed candidates include the vice-president, Frank Imbusch, and Aodhgan O Rodaighe, a member of the Higher Education Authority. The mathematician, Martin Newell, was apprenticed early for the job as his father was president of UCG for years. Even better for the purpose of winning votes, he was a member of the Galway football team which won three all-Irelands in a row in the 1960s.
Sean Stewart, a builder tram Gort and a member of the governing body, is also believed to be interested in the job, while Frank Cannon, a microbiologist currently working in Amherst, Massachusetts, is the only known outside applicant so far. The former registrar, Patrick Fottrell, may also stand, but would have to retire upon reaching 65 in three years' time.
KPMG, which handles the selection procedure, has warned applicants that confidentiality cannot be guaranteed. This is likely to scare off people like Danny O'Hare of DCU and Gay Corr of Galway RTC, who are thought to be interested but could not afford to lose. The outsider contenders will be revealed next month when the shortlist is announced. Then the politicking starts in earnest, as the candidates seek the votes at the county councillors, Government nominees and staff on the governing body.