And the Oscar for best dress went to...

THE right dress often maketh the superstar – think Liz Hurley in her Versace safety pins, Marilyn in her nude sequins singing Happy Birthday to JFK – and it seems Saoirse Ronan may have had another such wardrobe epiphany at the Oscars this week. She’d brought two versions of her Calvin Klein dress, one in emerald and one in mint, and in the end she went for the full Paddy’s Day green... and straight onto every post-Oscars best dressed list too. As much as her turn in Brooklyn, that green dress really elevated her to A-list status. It was, she says, as comfortable as ‘my sweats in sparkles’, and was modelled for her curves alone and cut on her body – much like Marilyn’s, in fact, for that iconic performance. HOW shrewd of PhoneWatch to hire Twink as the new face of home security, following her own very nasty burglary last month. The raiders trashed her house, she said this week, pulled panels off bedroom and bathroom walls, smashed pictures and even ‘ate the little sweets I kept by my bed’. A shovel was found in the house and gardaí said that, if she’d interrupted them, they were planning to use it on her. Only if they got to it first, though – ‘God help them if I’d walked in on them,’ she said, ‘don’t think I wouldn’t have picked it up myself’. Forget PhoneWatch, where can I sign up for TwinkWatch? SIMON Coveney, once spoken of as a future Fine Gael leader, really landed up to his neck in it this week when he suggested that his party would be ‘willing to talk’ about water – despite his boss insisting that we were stuck with the charges. It wasn’t a u-turn, he said, he was just ‘trying to reflect what people want’. A bit late in the day for a change of heart... Anyone else reminded of Groucho Marx? ‘Those are my principles – and if you don’t like them, well, I’ve got others!’