Mops sweated brow...

Phew! That was a close thing. Well no, not really a close thing – a win by nearly  20%  isn’t close. At the same time, I thought for a while there that that damned Adams and his crowd, not to mention that stuck-up amadan Shane Ross, between the pair of them and the Cusack love-child with a face on him like a cherub with crow’s-feet  – between them I thought for a while we were for the big drop. I did, as sure as I’m standing here I did. The heart was cross-ways on me – it’s bacon-slicer time, says I to myself.  If we hadn’t produced the goods, Angela would have had my arse for breakfast. But thanks be to the dear divine God and his blessed mother we’re home and hosed, that’s the important thing. I know we could have done a Lisbon and run the whole thing again if nip had come to tuck, but that’s a last resort. Wedon’t want to keep using it too often or people might notice.

Hogan, the big baldy culchie,  was all for a public victory bash, give the troops an arm round the shoulders and a pat on the rear for all their efforts, but I told him straight I was having none of it. Hogan reads too many bloody papers telling him he’s the real head honcho and is the man that pulls my strings. Well let me tell ye, it is I,  An Taoiseach, that’ll be doing any pulling’s  in need of doing around here. I move on a different plane and the sooner that big latchico gets that straight, the better. And I know lepping about shouting yee-ho only gets up the noses of the ones you’ve beat, and by God they don’t forget. “Get you in the long grass” is what that brings on you. So far better, says I to myself, far better do  the dignified restraint thing. In public, that is. In private is another matter. Once we got the door locked and the curtains pulled on Friday, Fionnuala and myself were doing somersaults and high fives and a number of other things I’m not going to discuss.  Just let me tell you, it was only mighty. Pure mighty.

I’d half-intended to invite Gilmore over, have a kind of discreet  hooley, make as if I actually like the little gobshite.  Only after watching the way he conducted himself during the campaign, I made damned sure I didn’t stand within so much as a hundred yards of him.  Didn’t he spend most of the campaign leaking support, losing practically every voter he ever had to those bloody Shinners? You’d think by now he’d have worked out how to get the upper hand on his erstwhile comrades but no, he let Mary Lou and that schoolboy one with the glasses, Peadar Toibin, run rings round him,   rings I’m telling yeh.   And  him turning purple  on the television when he couldn’t think what to say next.

Anyway, thanks be to the dear sweet Jesus and his divine Mother, the whole thing is out of the way at last. From here on we can cut  cut cut, and none of them can blame us for we’ll just point at the Treaty, it’s the Fiscal Treaty, lads, ye voted for it and ye got it. It’s the ones in Europe are playing the financial tune entirely now, it’s the Germans are doing the sums, so don’t bother blaming me any more.

God, I think I’ll sit down for a bit,  the oul’ heart is hammering. Post-traumatic stress,  it must be. Here, would one of ye get me a double whiskey.  And isn't it the mercy of God we'll have no more voting for a couple of years itself.