Eoghan Fortycoats

Eoghan Harris has had more political leaders than Monica Lewinsky and the anointment by Bertie Ahern of this political gadfly as a senator has startled many loyal Fianna Fáil members.
Harris started off on the political yellow-brick road by being a guru of the Stalinist Workers’ Party in the 1980s, when the WP – and Harris were unashamed big fans of the Kremlin, the KGB and the Berlin Wall. After the WP splintered and Democratic Left was formed, he worked with the Labour Party and claims to have practically single-handedly got Mary Robinson elected as President of Ireland in 1990.
Harris then hid his ‘I kissed the Berlin Wall’ hat in his closet and donned a Blueshirt. He became an advisor to Fine Gael leader John Bruton and scripted a cringe-making sketch for Twink at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis derided as crass and sexist, even by Fine Gaelers.
Harris then viciously opposed the election of Mary McAleese, denouncing her as “a tribal time bomb” because she came from a nationalist background in Belfast.
Harris worked behind the scenes with Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble. He then flirted with the Progressive Democrats. Then he pledged his allegiance to the Soldiers of Destiny on The Late, Late Show in a pre-election sucking up to Fianna Fáil the Builders’ Party, the Friday before polling day that might have the Sun headlining in his imagination, “It was Harris wot won it!”
Confused by the tormented Harris’s political carpet-bagging? Never mind, let’s recap and try and make sense of Harris’s track record that earned him the admiration of the Fianna Fáil leadership: –
Leading ideologist and strategist in the Workers’ Party – which reviled one particular party for allegedly revitalising the IRA after the pogroms: Fianna Fáil;
Advisor to the Labour Party – opposed to Fianna Fáil;
Advisor to John Bruton and Fine Gael  – opposed to Fianna Fáil;
Advisor to David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party – opposed to all shades of republicanism, including Fianna Fáil.
And the result of all this political hard work fighting Fianna Fáil? The only political office the former Marxist Harris has ever held – handed to him on a plate by the leader of Fianna Fáil.
What was that quote from Marx (Groucho)? “Those are my principles – and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.”

Political coup

Before Bertie anointed Harris as a chosen son of Fianna Fáil, Harris used his column in the Sunday Independent to attack the Seanad election pact between the Labour Party and Sinn Féin.
“Supporting Sinn Féin,” Harris insisted, “is a betrayal of the party’s democratic tradition.” The Labour/Sinn Féin concord, he added, “smacks of a political coup” by Labour Party campaign managers.
And what, you might ask, is so democratic about Harris accepting a non-elected senatorial sinecure from the party he spent so many years reviling without ever contesting one single election?

Harris’s Ballycastle babe fantasies

Many experts have often wondered what goes on inside Eoghan Harris’s head but Sunday Business Post scribe Pat Leahy has recalled that Harris once revealed in his old column in the Sunday Times perhaps a little too much of his saucy secret fantasies.
‘’My own erotic tastes are totally normal,” Harris wrote.
“My bedroom fantasies favour the kind of buxom Ballycastle woman who is the backbone of the Unionist Party and could swallow a babe-waif for breakfast.”
Normal? Hope female senators are on their guard.

Clinton or bust

One of the things Senator Eoghan Harris won’t have to worry about is columnists looking down his cleavage, not like Senator Hillary Clinton.
Hillary’s people are having a spat with the famous Washington Post and its fashion writer, the Pullitzer Prize-winning Robert Givhan.
Givhan wrote an article about the former First Lady’s low neckline when she made a speech to the US Senate. In a fund-raising letter circulated later by the Clinton camp, urging people to “take a stand against this kind of coarseness and pettiness”, an aide wrote:
“Can you believe that the Washington Post wrote a 746-word article on Hillary’s cleavage? I’ve seen some off-topic press coverage – but talking about body parts? That is grossly inappropriate.”
The Post’s Pullitzer Prize winner hit back, denying he was coarse or insulting.
“It was a piece about a public person’s appearance on the Senate floor that was surprising because of the location and because of the person. It’s disingenuous to think that revealing cleavage, any amount of it, in that kind of situation is a non-issue.”
Other observers didn’t share Mr Givhan’s insight into Mrs Clinton’s breasts.
Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman said that Givhan “managed to make a media mountain out of a half-inch valley”.
Givhan isn’t giving up looking at Mrs Clinton’s cleavage.
“I would never say the column was about a body part. It was about a style of dress.
“People have gone down the road of saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re writing about her breasts.’
“I wasn’t writing about her breasts. I was writing about her neckline.”
And her neckline leads to where?

Love Ulster culture vulture

Willie Frazer won’t be parading his Love Ulster bandwagon through Dublin’s fair city again this year after all but he will be treating us instead to a “cultural event”.
What this will be is still anyone’s guess but I don’t think it will include Ulster Scots poets sniffing lines of cocaine off a UDA Lambeg drum. Or will it?