Will Labour Again Play the Mouse? Or Can It Become the Gruffalo? [Eire Region]
Mail on Sunday › February 13, 2011
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Summary
FOR several days I've been ruminating on the intriguing choice made by Eamon Gilmore when canvassing duties called on him to read a children's story for schoolchildren in Eason's bookshop in Navan last Wednesday. Standing there listening, I wondered if there wasn't perhaps a previously undetected sense of mischief lurking behind the rather earnest exterior of the Labour Party leader.
The book he read was The Gruffalo, by Julia Donaldson, a story in rhyming couplets about a mouse who invents a giant animal friend whom he calls 'the Gruffalo' in order to avoid being eaten by the fox, the owl or the snake. Interestingly, it is based on an ancient Chinese fable about a fox and a tiger, but, in adapting the story, Donaldson couldn't think of any rhymes for 'tiger', and so invented the Gruffalo to get around the problem. The difficulty finding rhymes for 'tiger' is something we Irish can empathise with right now.See the full content of this document
Extract
Will Labour Again Play the Mouse? Or Can It Become the Gruffalo? [Eire Region]
Gilmore started off by assuring the children that the story bore 'no relationship to any political leader', but at the end couldn't resist observing that the Gruffalo 'might be a member of Fianna Fail!'
The quip stands, but not for long. The story of this election is the search for a new Big Beast, an...See the full content of this document
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