Noonan goes from bad to worse

Until Sunday night Michael Noonan's prospects were dismal. The Irish Times/MRBI poll of last Friday had been deeply depressing, the Eircom wheeze had backfired, he had been awful on The Late Late Show, the party had dithered for weeks on the abortion referendum issue, the "fake" Dermot O'Leary crisis had fallen flat, and, of course, the John Bruton legacy on party finances had been deeply embarrassing.

But there was a turn on Sunday night.

The message of the Friday poll was bleak. The core vote was down to 15 percentage points nationally but the national figure masked an even more depressing reality.

The core vote was 22 percentage points in Connaught/ Ulster, reflecting the strength of the party in Mayo, but in Munster it was 14 per cent - Noonan's heartland! - and in Dublin a miserable 13 per cent.

Noonan's personal "satisfaction rating" was also depressing. Only 31 per cent nationally were satisfied with how he was doing his job as leader of Fine Gael, in Munster (the "heartland") more people were dissatisfied than satisfied (36 per cent and 35 per cent respectively) and quarter of all those intending to vote Fine Gael were dissatisfied with him.

In fact almost the same proportion of intending Fine Gael voters were satisfied with Bertie Ahern's performance (54 per cent) as were satisfied with Michael Noonan's performance (57 per cent).

The Eircom wheeze at a stroke neutralised one of Fine Gael's traditionally strong cards vis-à-vis Fianna Fáil: fiscal rectitude. You could trust Fine Gael not to squander the public's money on vote-getting ruses.

Now that card was thrown away - the public was to be required to compensate those who had gambled and lost on shares in an attractive State enterprise. Some 400,000 of us had bought Eircom shares in the expectation of making a profit at the expense of the public - we all thought the shares were being sold too cheaply otherwise we would not have bought them. We had seen those shares increase spectacularly in value in the weeks immediately after the flotation and in expectation of an ever bigger killing we held on to them.

Then when we suffer losses as the share price collapses, with telecom shares collapsing worldwide, Fine Gael intervenes and wants to compensate us for our losses at the cost of £90 million to the public.

And it transpires that Michael Noonan and Jim Mitchell themselves would be significant beneficiaries of this wheeze.

The Telenor fiasco did damage to Fine Gael at the outset of Michael Noonan's tenure but not as much damage as it should do before the election campaign is over.

We still have not been given an adequate explanation for Fine Gael not informing the Moriarty tribunal of the Telenor donation when the party leadership says it first discovered it. They say they didn't disclose it because Telenor asked them not to, but Telenor denies any such request.

Aside from these embarrassments there was the failure of Michael Noonan to stand for anything at all. When he was banished to the backbenches after his first heave against John Bruton in 1994, Michael Noonan talked of taking "leadership positions".

What leadership positions has he ever taken on anything - I'll get to the corporate donations in a moment - either then or since and especially what leadership position has he taken since he got the leadership position? (As for the corporate donations - what possible difference does it make whether rich people give money to Fine Gael through their own bank account or through their company's bank account?)

No leadership positions, just tactics and cuteness - especially cuteness.

But on Sunday night things changed.

For the worse.

On Sunday night on the This Week in Politics, an RTÉ television programme - in an item that was otherwise notable only for the unfortunate camera angle fixed on Michael Noonan as he was crouched in a bar somewhere in Co Wicklow - he was asked about the Brigid McCole case in the context of the No Tears television drama.

You would have expected the expert tactician and master of cuteness to have batted that off and repeated his regrets for his mistakes in the handling of that affair. Instead he defended what he did (Judge Fidelma Macken found he had handled the case "appropriately", he said).

How will he cope with questions such as: if what you did was appropriate, as you claimed on Sunday night, why did you previously apologise for your handling of the affair?

How is it appropriate to compensate speculators in a shares gamble and not appropriate to make generous compensation to the Hepatitis C victims of State negligence?

If his political opponents had sought to revive the Hepatitis C debacle in the run-in to a general election campaign, they could not have contrived to do it so expertly.

Prospects are dismal no longer. They are desperate.