SMOKES & DAGGERS
Inside the corridors of power...
BEFORE the Christmas break, Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher asked Health Minister Simon Harris the number of reports that have been commissioned by him since his appointment. Unfortunately for Billy, saintly Simon was able to say he had not directly commissioned any reports since becoming minister, a feat which made for an interesting contrast with Billy’s boss, Micheál Martin, who managed to famously commission 115 reports at a cost of more than €30m when he was health minister. And one of those reports was an, ahem, value for money audit of the health system.
SMOKES spotted Brian Ormond and Pippa O’Connor, pictured, returning from Dubai this week through Dublin Airport with their children. All was going swimmingly until their matching luggage fell off their baggage trolley. It meant other travellers had to step around the mess while Ormond tried to rehitch the wagon. As they say in parts of Dublin, morto!
DJ LEO’s playlist for his short stint on Radio One this week attracted a few soothsayers (should we call them LeoSayers?) interested in reading the tea leaves. It included Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now – something Leo, left, has often been accused of playing. And was The Gloaming’s Samhradh, Samhradh a hint of the timing of the next election? If so, his choice of Edie Brickell’s version of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall was instructive.
JOHN HALLIGAN has compared his relationship with his Fine Gael Government colleagues to the relationship of the Spartans and Persians, telling the Irish Times that he lived by King Leonidas’s words on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae: ‘If we have to die, from them take everything and give them nothing.’ ‘And it might come to that,’ the Spartan minister explained. So were the Spartans also fighting for improved regional medical services?
WE DON’T like pointing out typos in other newspapers, under the ‘there but for the grace of God’ principle. But there were some egregious examples in an Irish Times report this week that were highlighted by Times reader Barry Doherty. The mistakes came in a report on the potential effect of Brexit on European security cooperation, which had numerous bloopers. The report renamed Angela Merkel, pictured, as Dr Angela Murkily, a German politician Andrej Hunko as Andrade Hunky and the German parliament the Bundestag, as the German football league, the Bundesliga. A rogue spellcheck, perhaps? We also noted that it renamed The Club De Berne, a Europe-wide security forum, as the Club of Borne. Jason Borne, perhaps?