Last Thursday, in case you missed it, Joe Donnelly was on Tom Dunne’s Newstalk show talking about how he interviewed Enda Kenny just before the last general election. He dubbed the piece ‘Enda’s Dream’ – it’s full of L-M-A-O goodness.

Full credit to Joe for sharing it. Reproducing it here as Newstalk have yet to as a separate download and I don’t want it to get lost. Enjoy! (If you are reading this in a feed reader, open the post in a browser to see the audio embed)

Picture courtesy of finegael.ie and audio from Newstalk

Newsflash! George Lee has resigned his Dublin South seat and membership of the Fine Gael party after a mere nine months as he said it was made clear he had no place to institute change.

He said he went into politics for a specific reason and he didn’t believe he could achieve that. Lee said that the Fine Gael front bench were ‘nice people’. His appointment as chairman to an economic committee was pointed to as a face exercise.

Olivia Mitchell dispelled Lee’s assertions saying that he went to parliamentary party meetings but added nothing ‘new’ to the meetings. Newstalk is reporting that Mitchell and Michael Ring both said Lee should have given it more time. Epic sour grapes expected to follow.

Update!

George Lee’s Statement

I wish to announce that I have resigned from the Fine Gael Party and from my seat in Dáil Eireann today Monday 8^th February 2010.

It has been a very difficult decision, but it is one that I have taken after a great deal of reflection on my position and on the role that I have been playing in Fine Gael since I joined that Party in May last year.

The nine months since then have been a period of enormous economic upheaval. Throughout that period I have done my best to play a positive role in contributing to the national debate and to efforts to find a solution for many of the country’s economic problems.

The reality, however, is that despite my best efforts I have had virtually no influence or input into shaping Fine Gael’s economic policies at this most critical time.

The role I have been playing within the party has been very limited and I have found this to be personally unfulfilling.

When I entered politics last May I made it clear that I was doing so because I wanted to try to play a new role contributing to economic policy formulation. After nine months of trying within the political system it is now my considered view that the role available to me within Fine Gael is not a role I am happy to play.

I would like thank most sincerely all those who campaigned for me, for all of their efforts and support. I would also like to thank my Secretarial and Parliamentary Assistants for all of the help and work that they have provided to me.

I particularly want to thank the electorate of Dublin South who voted for me in such large numbers last May. It has been a great privilege and an honour to serve on their behalf. However, I do not believe I would be serving the electorate honestly if I were to continue allowing my efforts and mandate to be used to promote and market economic policies into which I have had no input.

Kenny was on a roll talking up Fine Gael’s successive opinion poll numbers until he was asked by a listener if he was in favour of water charges. After falling over his words, Kenny admitted that Fine Gael hasn’t a position on the reintroduction of water charges yet.

The water charges chatter comes about five minutes into this snippet from the show.

Photo: Dreamstime

Interesting to see Newstalk adopt a Liveblog-esque mish-mash of streaming video from Oireachtas.ie, in-widget Facebook statusing and Twitter updates all collected in one spot. Not sure about the size of the widget but it’s nice to see it. They are even using the hashtag #budget10!

Just hope they change the livestream to the Dáil because the Seanad isn’t due to speak on the Budget until Thursday afternoon!