SMOKES & DAGGERS
Inside the corridors of power...
THE sheer size of the pay hike being offered to the Luas workers – up to 19% for the drivers – has vindicated the hardline stance taken by some staff who had apparently shocked even their own union reps when they demanded a 54% pay hike. As one industrial relations expert quipped to Smokes this week: ‘No trade union official has the right to set a boundary on the aspirations of their members.’ IT’S not every week that the ultrasophisticated New Yorker magazine gets too excited by Irish language novels but this week is an exception. Manhattan’s finest periodical has published a gushing review of not one but two translations of the 1948 dark satirical novel Cré na Cille (Churchyard Clay) which had never appeared in English until now. The novel achieves a ‘magnificently improbable universality’, which after much scratching of our head, makes us think they rather like it. FORMER banker Tiarnan O’Mahoney, pictured, will have been a relieved man to walk from court after his conviction for conspiracy to defraud Revenue and falsify records was overturned. At 56, O’Mahoney is still a young man but we’re confident he’ll take a slightly less brash approach if he re-enters the business world.
Launching his ill-fated ISTC investment fund in 2005, he boasted: ‘There is only one objective and that is to make money. This is unashamed capitalism. There is no debating the issue. This is about making money.’
Ah, the good old days! SMOKES is getting a little worried about Michael O’Leary, pictured below. Once the country’s favourite grouch, he would come out with such peaches as: ‘Nobody wants to sit beside a really fat b****** on board. We have been frankly astonished at the number of customers who not only want to tax fat people but torture them.’
Now, he’s a changed man who’s made Ryanair all touchy-feely and admitted being close to tears after his Gold Cup victory on Friday. Bring back the grouch! AND who can forget O’Leary’s famous threat to charge passengers for using Ryanair’s toilets: ‘One thing we have looked at is maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door, so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in the future. Pay-per-pee. If someone wanted to pay £5 to go to the toilet, I’d carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver.’