dates and selection

After my conversion to Unicode and implementing new drivers (Thank god still
up no down time :-)) I do have an issue with some of my sql selects
concerning dates.

I know the long answer, but am asking if there is a short one.

I have in some of my slq :

(to_char(e.incidentdate, 'Mon DD YYYY'::text) || ' '::text) ||
e.incidenttime::text as incidentdate

I used to be able to sort and select by incident date and it was working ok
(I think).

Now I found I had to do something like this just to have a timestamp
(problem is I do not want the format of the time stamp, my clients want to
see the month as a string)

((to_char(e.incidentdate, 'Mon DD YYYY'::text) || ' '::text) ||
e.incidenttime::text)::timestamp as datetoselectby

Is there any way to reference the text type variable as a date selection?
(was this ever working or was I hallucinating).

Many thanks for all the help.

Joel Fradkin