SMOKES & DAGGERS

GOOD to know the new oversized €1.8m Oireachtas printer will be worth it. Among the 25 million items listed as being printed on the old machine since the start of last year, at a total cost of €600,000, were 9,000 two-page flyers for one Timothy Dalton, described as a ‘Fianna Fáil

TD’. Timothy Dalton is, of course, the British actor who starred in two James Bond films, The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill. Shurely shome mishtake, Mr Bond…

AT LEAST Senator

David Norris, rather than using the Oireachtas printer, has found alternate ways to wish constituents a Happy Christmas. The Dublin University representative placed an ad in the Irish Times, with an image of himself reclining in an armchair, wishing all a ‘Merry Christmas’. Smokes estimates the cost of the ad at over €4,000! POOR Jeremy Corbyn, it really wasn’t his day attending the opening of the UK Parliament after Boris’s landslide. He compared new MPs viewing the Queen’s Speech to a pantomime. This lead to quips that when it comes to Jeremy’s career, it’s a case of ‘Look behind you’. LAST week Independent Cork TD Michael Collins called for the Dáil bar to be shut. ‘The availability of alcohol in our workplace is wrong,’ Mr Collins said. Frankly, given what Smokes has to listen to in there we are firmly of the belief – rather like the French existentialists and Absinthe – that alcohol is a necessary anaesthetic.

THE most accurate map yet of the British Isles has emerged. Showing the geography of the ‘Republic of Craicistan’ the map shows areas where craic is to be had (Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland) in green, while areas of ‘no craic whatsoever’ (England and Wales) are in beige. The sooner the Scots’ mutiny and the rest of them ‘get Brexit done’, the better.