The biggest political party in the land are in a hotel in the west and invite the media to observe and interview them – it’s a think-in, time to rebuild the country, serious work to be done, lots of men to come and talk to the politicians about what needs to be done.

The Prime Minister of Ireland stays up very late singing and doing impressions in the hotel bar like some Student Union hack and does an interview (which he is late for) on Morning Ireland (who must be delighted with their scoop and web traffic) and is tired, muffled and stumbling.

By the time that the interview finished people were texting each other, twittering and going online. There were demands for the interview recording and then questions were being asked.

Simon Coveney TD who has only ever sent 18 tweets and would not be expert in the medium to any degree expressed his views and became the target for the Fianna Fáil battering ram. The political correspondents who were in Galway may have been still asleep when Cowen did the interview given that some of them were up late enough themselves watching Cowen doing his impresssions of Micheal O’Muircheartaigh and Philip Walton (?) amongst others. If Cowen had not gone on Morning Ireland there might have been a few little references to the Taoiseach singing and party unity etc. and nothing more would have been said.

But shortly after 9am people started rining into John Murray’s programme on Radio 1, Today FM’s Ray Darcy and local radio stations. The recording became available, and the clips went out on Pat Kenny and times, songs and impressions started to emerge. Editors rang their political correspondents and people got out of bed and started to ask questions.

FF went into spin mode, Newstalk who can’t get government ministers to appear without extreme grovelling had Dermot Ahern in situ to defend the Taoiseach and the message agreed to by him, Micheal Martin and Mary Hanafin who appeared on radio throughout the day was the hoarseness and nasal congestion and it was all Simon Coveney’s fault.

And Fianna Fáil continue to want you to believe that it’s Simon’s fault.

Not a failure in judgement, not one of many incidents when the Taoiseach has been ill or ill-prepared. Not a story which has appeared in the New York Times, Channel 4 News and numerous other international media outlets – Mary Minihan has a piece in today’s Irish Times.

Simon Coveney could not lead a football team bless him, never mind a revolution against the behaviour, tone and attitude of the Taoiseach. And the same goes for his colleagues in Fine Gael – they have failed on numerous confidence votes in the present Dáil to inflict a scratch on him.

While Fianna Fáil were at dinner on Monday night, many of the population were watching Freefall and again noting how Ahern and Cowen were fingered for the banking regulation collapse but still blamed it on Lehman. On Monday Brian Lenihan warned the Irish public that even more cuts in spending were coming and more services would suffer.

As P. O’Neill points out there were many more problems with Cowen’s interview other than how he sounded. These should be the media’s talking points – his ineptitude on the policy matters under discussion and fixing the problems that he and his government have caused.