DÁIL SKETCH:Joe Higgins unleashes dusty rhetoric as Nulty and Gilmore just smile

THERE WAS a sequel to the Dublin West byelection in the Dáil yesterday.

Labour victor Patrick Nulty sat among his colleagues, beaming with all the delight and optimism of the newly elected TD.

Tánaiste and Labour leader Eamon Gilmore looked happy, too, his party having also won the presidential election.

Joe Higgins, whose Socialist Party colleague Ruth Coppinger had been tipped by some to win the byelection, did not look so happy. But, then, Higgins never looks happy when he castigates Labour, a party of which he was once a member.

From deep on the Opposition benches, Higgins focused his wrath on Labour and its leader.

“The Tánaiste slavishly submits to the diktats of the financial markets and those faceless institutions that hold the lives of tens and hundreds of millions of Europeans in their grip.’’

He suggested that Labour might consider merging “into the grey mass that surrounds it on the Government benches’’.

Nulty smiled. His Labour colleagues smiled. Gilmore still looked happy. Higgins still looked unhappy.

Gilmore said Labour’s purpose was to solve the economic mess, get people back to work and build a better and fairer society.

He suggested it would be welcome if Higgins, and other TDs who criticised the Government, occasionally put forward a constructive proposal.

Higgins remarked that the “great socialist’’ James Connolly would reject with contempt Labour’s present role.

“What about Trotsky?’’ asked Labour’s Emmet Stagg. “The deputy should give some credit to him.’’ Higgins ploughed on, claiming modern Labour believed the “last bond and debenture should be repaid to the European speculators and bondholders’’.

Gilmore decided to put the byelection boot in. Tongue in cheek, he thanked his political foe for his kind remarks about the Labour backbenchers.

“I am sure he will have noticed their number has been added to by one with the election of Deputy Nulty in the same constituency as Deputy Higgins.’’ Pointing his finger at Higgins, he said he could not help notice how he had failed to congratulate the new TD in the House on Wednesday.

Higgins insisted he had shaken hands with the new TD “in the depths of the night’’ at the count in Citywest. Gilmore urged Higgins to abandon his “100-year-old rhetoric’’ and make some modern proposals.

Time meant that another battle was over between Higgins and his former party. It will be resumed on the ground in Dublin West and in the Dáil in the fullness of time.

Higgins failed to cast any gloom over the Labour benches where smiles had only widened as he intensified his broadside.

When Labour promised in the 1960s that the 1970s would be socialist, the cynics claimed that the socialists would be 70 before an electoral breakthrough was made. Now a 70-year-old socialist is about to take up occupancy in the Áras, and a young TD has been added to its Dáil ranks.

It will be hard for Higgins to wipe the Labour smiles away, at least this side of the budget. But it will not stop him trying.