SMOKES& DAGGERS

Inside the corridors of power...

CONSTERNATION gripped political correspondents on Friday night when a story emerged that two ‘former’ political activists from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had exchanged data on a potential coalition. It further emerged that the two men were ‘unmandated’ by their respective parties. It turns out that the two men had lunch near Grafton Street and agreed the parties should go into coalition. DONALD TRUMP really doesn’t like Seán O’Rourke. Back in 2014, when the businessman visited his golf resort in Doonbeg, he was interviewed by the RTÉ presenter, pictured, who had the temerity to ask him about his strange hair. Trump appeared to take it well but was very, very angry afterwards. He subsequently gave an interview to the Sunday Independent’s Life magazine, which placed Trump on the front page and turned his most arresting quote into a very large front-page headline: ‘Seán O’Rourke is an a***hole.’ So is O’Rourke worried to have incurred the wrath of the man who could be America’s next president? Not a bit of it! Instead, O’Rourke has had some business cards printed that give his mobile and email address beneath a reproduction of that same Life magazine cover. CATHOLIC Independent John O’Gorman ran unsuccessfully for a Dáil seat in Limerick County, but he hasn’t stopped campaigning. He thinks priests should go back to placing the Host on communicants’ tongues rather than into their hands, and proposes that if there’s a concern about hygiene, priests could always wear disposable gloves. Mr O’Gorman polled 207 first preferences in the general election. BOWDOIN College in Brunswick, Maine, is the alma mater of Nathaniel Hawthorne, pictured, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s unlikely that those distinguished men of letters would recognise the place today. It has been making headlines in recent days because of a student ‘tequila party’ at which somebody distributed sombreros. The college has reacted with horror to this ‘act of ethnic stereotyping’, as the dean of student affairs described it. In short order, the students’ general assembly voted unanimously to condemn this act of ‘cultural appropriation’ and demand that administrators establish ‘a supportive space for students who have been or feel targeted’. Or, as one newspaper headline neatly summarised the whole controversy: ‘Students offered counselling over small sombrero hats at tequilathemed birthday party.’