It’s this kind of attitude that our president’s husband wants to quash with his wonderful corporately-driven initiative.

Come on Ireland! We need you now!

With a background like that, he’s on the wrong reality show.

He might wear the jeans and the oul’ shirt and have the oul’ cup of coffee in his hand

So either he sees O’Leary as an abattoir worker on his tea break, or rather than a coffee cup, he actually sees a samurai sword or a pirate’s cutlass. The sever criticism that Tony Blair got for invading Iraq was based on the same phenomenon, I’d say.

Or I could be talking bollocks.

Phallic Mother: International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

The so-called phallic mother is a mother who is fantasmatically endowed with a phallus. Among the male child’s earliest sexual theories, he believes that all people have the male genital. By substituting the phallus for the organ that the child thinks the female is lacking, he tries to protect himself from the castration anxiety that arises from the primal fantasies of the mother. The fear of the phallic mother imago tacitly affirms the threat of castration, while at the same time defensively negating it along with all its oral and anal pregenital foundations.

…..

According to Klein’s theory of early stages of the oedipal conflict, several key concepts are inseparable from that of the phallic mother: the symbolic analogy between breast and penis, projective identification, and the infantile sexual theory of the combined parent-figure (1932). The last term refers to the fantasy that the castrating mother is endowed with the paternal penis, which was incorporated during intercourse; thus it represents the mother and father in a menacing combination.

Today, understanding the investment in the imago of the phallic mother is clinically useful for understanding the pregenital basis of castration anxiety as related to early scenarios of triangulation. Nevertheless, care must be taken because “the relation to the phallic mother is not prior to castration, but rather signified through it” (Green, 1968). In other words, the archaic imago of the phallic mother is expressed in a secondary cultural image only retroactively.

In reality, O’Leary -with all his talk of cutting and slashing- produces castration anxiety in Cullen, who mobilises the phallic mother to fight his corner. Or maybe he was just talking bollocks.

So, what Cullen actually said was: “My mother has more shawls that Michael O’Leary”, which I think is probably true.

Millionaires row as Cullen slates ‘cynical’ O’Leary in verbal volley - National News, Frontpage - Independent.ie

Mr Cullen, who is the star of TV3’s hit show The Apprentice, said Mr O’Leary’s only motivation is to humiliate the Government while he makes money for his airline. “Without a doubt I think he is ruthless, he is cynical and he has no integrity,” he said.

“It’s all about publicity and ego. He might dress down. He might wear the jeans and the oul’ shirt and have the oul’ cup of coffee in his hand and all that stuff but that’s all an act. He has a huge ego.”

Hopefully humble Bill Cullen can rein in raging egomaniac O’Leary so we can get all this country back on track else we shall all cry tears of a clown.