SMOKES & DAGGERS

Inside the corridors of power...

IT’S a bit rich for Sinn Féin to be grabbing all the mayoralties for the 1916 centenary – given that the party couldn’t be bothered to answer Pearse and Connolly’s call to show up for the actual event. That’s right – Sinn Féin has conveniently forgotten that the party had neither hand, act nor part in the Rising. Shinners weren’t even republicans at the time, favouring instead a dual monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model.

FINE Gael ministers have been feeling the heat, so when Leo Varadkar found this sign in a Co. Meath school, it struck a chord. It says: ‘Safe Place, I come here when I’m not feeling well, I feel angry (headache), I am upset’. Leo tweeted the sign with a plaintive message: ‘Found this in Mary Mother of Hope School in Clonee. We should install one in minister’s (sic) offices.’

THE desecration last week of the Lia Fáil should have provoked particular ire from Fianna Fáil because the knob-shaped Coronation Stone at Tara is ultimately where the party gets its name. ‘Fál’ is cognate with ‘phallus’ (‘destiny’ was a euphemism employed by Victorian prudes), so the name of the party really translates as something like ‘Militia of Penis’. Was ever a party so aptly named?

RED-FACED RTÉ has blamed ‘technical errors’ for the fact that Christmas songs like Jingle Bells and Silent Night were played on Radio 1 on two days last week. Most embarrassingly, nobody noticed for four hours.

SMOKES readers are well aware that the Dáil plinth has its own Twitter account, with 800-odd followers. But the plinth itself follows only one other account, that of Mary Mitchell O’Connor. It’s only natural that the plinth should want to know MMOC’s movements, since she once ran him over in her car. When the TD recently began following @dalkeyisland, the offended plinth tweeted: ‘Are you leaving me for a Plinth with a seaview?’ Whereat the ‘blonde’ bombshell replied: ‘Variety is the spice.’