SMOKES & DAGGERS

A mischievous mix of political asides with JOHN DRENNAN

■ THE standard of legitimate protest at the ‘Siege of the Dáil’ this week can best be summed up by the overheard roar at a garda: ‘My dole pays your salary.’ Hmm. Not quite sure that’s how that works.

■ OBSERVERS followed the egress of Michael McDowell with interest during the siege. The great bête noire of radicals strode purposefully out the front door and, in an indication of the permanent revolution in politics, his exit did not spark a single boo.

■ SINN Féin was to the fore in (correctly) criticising the siege. The party, of course, in 2010 engaged in its own spat when a group of protesters, led by Aengus Ó Snodaigh, broke through barriers in Government Buildings. The then-revolutionaries quickly retreated – like a dog that catches a car but doesn’t know what to do next.

■ PASCHAL DONOHOE was asked at a press conference about Fine Gael’s infamous €1,000 tax break, which was the subject of a controversial article in the Irish Independent earlier this year, written by three junior ministers. Caught (figuratively) between his Cabinet colleague Michael McGrath and (literally) two of the three junior ministers (Jennifer Carroll MacNeill and Martin Heydon), Paschal, played a blinder. One observer said: ‘Paschal delivered an answer of such complexity by the time he had finished, everyone had forgotten the question.’

■ €14 for breakfast – that’s what one Government apparatchik paid at the Ploughing, noting: ‘You’d expect that in Temple Bar but €14 in a Laois village is a tad excessive.’ But: ‘You could have as much bread and butter as you wanted and the tea was scalding.’

■ ON being asked by Sinn Féin’s Johnny Mythen about a labour issue, Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien told the chamber: ‘We are on the cusp of national pay talks. In fact, we are in the middle of them.’ Things change quickly in politics.