Carla Missing As Sarkozy Makes Flying Irish Visit

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy flies to Ireland today to try to address the 'new Irish Question' even though there has been only one popular question on Irish lips in recent days: "Is Carla coming?" and the answer is "non" as the French Premiére Dame is too busy with her pop album to help the EC boss out.

While the Irish Question is why the country rejected the EU reform treaty, and what's to be done next? — an equally perplexing problem was why his fashionable wife wouldn't be at his side?

But there's already greater controversy. M Sarkozy said last week, and this was his first great diplomatic error, that Ireland would be "made to vote again".

Ireland, the EU country that owes most to the EU, voted against the proposed new rules, a vote seen by some as being against Ireland's own interests, taken after a referendum campaign dominated by the largely mendacious claims of Irish nationalists, left-wingers and Eurosceptic British newspapers.

M Sarkozy's words dismayed the Irish government and now to try to put things right, the Elysee Palace said M Sarkozy would devote his visit to Ireland to "listening and learning", rather than laying down the law.

This diplomatic error was far from Sarkozy’s first on the Question Irlandaise with the entire preparation for the visit by the EU president dismissed by one Irish newspaper as "a French farce".

All the more reason to bring Carla as what M Sarkozy did, or said, on his recent state visit to London in March paled behind Carla in her grey suit and pillbox hat. She converted the Eurosceptic, French-baiting section of the British press from mockery to tongue-hanging idolatry in two days.

But his visit has now been cut to just four hours and even those people who voted 'Yes' to Lisbon are hurting and M Sarkozy would have needed help from the missing Carla to solve the conundrum and or least have her pillbox hat distract the media.

(BMcC)