Watching Crisis: Inside the Cowen Government on Monday night, I realised something: for nearly three years, our Taoiseach was TinTin’s companion, Captain Haddock.
The evidence can be traced through the blotted comic-strip of 2008 to early 2011. Haddock is brash and grumpy (Mary O’Rourke might call him ‘truculent’). He’s fond of the Loch Lomond Single Malt whiskey (one’s mind drifts to the alleged line of pints on the bar the night before that Morning Ireland interview). Indeed, at times, Haddock’s drinking posed a greater hazard to TinTin than the villains he encountered. Finally, the Captain’s short-tempered outbursts are legendary (remember when challenged on NAMA in the Dáil, Cowen fumed "billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!"?)
Okay, we can put a line through the last tibit, but the outline of the two characters is beginning to converge. Where they diverge, however, is more telling: Haddock’s brashness and drinking were often used for comic effect.
One might say, then, that Haddock works as comic foil. Foil to whom? The courageous TinTin: a righteous and noble character. Brian Lenihan heroically battled pancreatic cancer, but, unlike TinTin (who continuously emerged from tight scrapes), this was one perilous situation he sadly could not disengage from. If ever Ireland needed TinTin, it was in the early hours of September 30th 2008. But all we got was Haddock.
Hergé, TinTin’s creator, in later editions, created a diverging destiny for Haddock. Resembling a weak character initially, the Captain would later earn our respect-his most noble act being in the pivotal Tintin in Tibet, in which he stoically volunteers to sacrifice his life to save Tintin. Cowen needed Hergé to continue drawing for him, but instead he blotted his own page. And, later, it was left for the troika to draw Ireland’s destiny.
