Eamon Gilmore, the Labour Leader, has appointed the young East Cork TD Sean Sherlock as a mockya shadow minister for something or other. He chose well if it's his intention to keep the Cloth Cap Brigade forever in the political wilderness. Because Sherlock, sadly, has nothing much to offer the working class -which, despite Gilmore's lack of vision, really does exist. (Ask Cllr Red Mick, for instance, or any of the Corpo Shinners, or Joe Gavin, and they'll quickly tell you who the working class are and where they are. Thousands of 'em).

You see young Sean Sherlock believes the idea of left and right is gone and that it's all about issues now. No leftie guff for him! Indeed, in his own words this is what he thinks of socialist ideology: 'What people care about is how parties manage situations as they arise, not their ideological position'.

Grand if a party doesn't give a hoot about the privatisation of health, the carve-up of the ESB, selling off public transport to the highest bidder, allowing education to fall into the hands of profiteers (Dublin now has more private schools than public ones), neutrality, housing, rural and urban development, the North -all of which require a clearly thought out ideological critique to prevent the quality of life falling further prey to the greed merchants.

Young Sherlock and his ex-Workers Party master are middle of the road men. And we all know what happens to people to stay in the middle of the road. They get knocked down!

Leave Ronan alone

The French said some rather scurrilous things about our Ronan O'Gara. Indeed, Sir Anto's organ, the Sunday Independent, disgustingly repeated most of them. So it was rather nice to see his father-in-law, Dominic Daly, jump to his defence. 'We are all there for him' said the Cork auctioneer. We are indeed. And it was nice too to see Dick Brazil come out of hibernation and report the dad-in-law's comments on the front page of a local newspaper. Well done, Dixie.