SMOKES & DAGGERS

Inside the corridors of power...

PASCAL DONOHOE’S demand that ministers get their departmental spending in order by the end of the month caused conniptions. Inevitably, there was one exception: head girl Katherine Zappone chirpily noted that that had been her plan anyway. A ministerial colleague sighs: ‘That’s Katherine for you, best girl again and an apple for Pascal at every cabinet meeting.’ Maybe not after the events of the past few days, though. AN ONLINE petition has been started to get RTÉ’s David Davin-Power to perform the viral dance move known as ‘dabbin’ live on RTÉ News. For the uninitiated – which included Smokes – ‘the dab’ is a dance move in which the dancer simultaneously drops their head while raising an arm and the elbow in a gesture that resembles sneezing into the arm. The tweet proposing this suggests that DDP, pictured, would ‘henceforth be known as David Dabbin-Power’ if it comes to pass. What does the big man himself think? ‘I’ll do it! I will – I swear!!’ he tweeted this week. We’ll be watching the Six-One News even more closely this week. SIMON COVENEY’S announcement about controversial pay increases for councillors was the catalyst for some stress in Leinster House as a horde of councillors descended upon the Seanad to hear the good news. It left the senators having to look after the hungry (and extremely thirsty visitants) who are their electorate. Afterwards, distressed senators wailed: ‘It was terrible, they were hanging around the offices looking for free things and cups of tea; they were like something out of the living dead.’ Which is poppycock of course. Even zombies would be hard-pressed to find any brains in Leinster House. IN SIMPLER times, a government communications unit was set up by Bertie Ahern to monitor the media. It occasioned quite a few furores about Big Brother monitoring. Alas, a query about the current cost of the mandarins marking the media occasioned the response that the unit had been stood down in 2014. It is rare one can say of any government body that it was so good we didn’t even notice it was gone. LEO VARADKAR is on tour with President Michael D. But a politician’s local work is never done: he tweeted a picture, right, of himself in Lima posing with two Castleknock constituents he happened to bump into. A small world but a very big parish pump.