CURRAGH, CO KILDARE
THE campaign is over but Bertie Ahern still seems to be wearing a kiss me quick hat. At the Budweiser Derby in Kildare yesterday queues formed to get to the Taoiseach's cheek. He reacted like a man still on the campaign trail.
Although he was his usual hit with the punters, Bertie lost his shirt (a fetching shade of blue) on the big race along with at least two of his Cabinet. It seemed Fianna Fail's finest had applied a zero tolerance policy to picking winners.
Mr Ahern insisted before the race that he was not a gambler. "I only put a few quid on. Nobody will get rich off me."
So there was probably no gnashing of teeth when his horse, Strawberry Roan, came eighth. Joe Walsh, the new Minister for Agriculture, backed the aptly named Silver Patriarch, which came fifth. Dr Jim McDaid celebrated his return from the wilderness to the tourism portfolio with an almost win from his horse, Dr Johnson.
But winners and losers embraced in the Kildare pavilion when former Justice Minister, Nora Owen, congratulated Mr Ahern and talked about how proud her mother had been when she became a minister.
There was another Mary and Bertie photo opportunity, probably the last of the honeymoon, when the Taoiseach and Tanaiste had a few words. Then the former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, arrived and Mary Harney returned to her table.
Mr Ahern's two daughters, Georgina and Cecilia, had followed him into the pavilion and sat smiling over their coleslaw for a while before leaving for the smokefilled "Bud World" tent. Here Spice Girls music and mud pie replaced the live jazz and Bollinger.
They might have been able to trade hints with Chelsea Clinton if the rumour was true that she was about to drop in from her holiday location somewhere in Ireland. "The rumours are getting so speculative at this stage they're not even funny," the man from the American embassy said as firmly as he could.
The American ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith's table boasted three Pulitzer Prize winners, with Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, writer and historian Dr Arthur Schlesinger and playwright Arthur Miller. His daughter, Rebecca, wife of actor Daniel Day Lewis, videoed the faces round the table with her handycam while the TV cameras looked on.
Actors Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan of Ballykissangel fame looked to be quietly enjoying themselves at the other end of the pavilion.
Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of Roald and modelling's hottest property, according to her agency, looked slightly bored before folding all 6 feet of herself into a Mercedes before the last race.
Jim McDaid said he was delighted to be attending one of his favourite events as a Minister. But, he said, Mr Ahern had insisted at the first Cabinet meeting that all Ministers be at their desks by 8.30 a.m. "And tomorrow is no exception."
The party will be hoping there was nothing prophetic about the words of Frankie Dettori, who rode the horse that the Taoiseach backed: "She just didn't perform as I would have liked and didn't quite stay."
