SMOKES & DAGGERS

A mischievous mix of (mostly) news

LOVELY tranquil place is St Brigid’s Garden in Roscahill in beautiful Connemara. There they have a tree that people tie wishes to, written on specially designed tags. One such tag this week read: ‘I wish for peace in Syria and Donald Trump to be assassinated. I also wish for peace in the world and for homeless children to be happy.’ Blessed are the peacemakers indeed. BRENDAN Howlin certainly knows how to kill a party (although not as much as Joan Burton). The Labour septuagenarians were getting ready to rock at their conference this week until Howlin, in the fourth sentence of his welcoming script, noted that ‘two hundred metres from here is the grave of John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party’, pictured left. The similarity of the strife in Labour to the IPP after 1918, and the ultimate fate of the poor old parliamentarians, did not go unnoticed. A LARGE crowd gathered at Garda HQ for the retirement of Assistant Commissioner Jack Nolan. Not among them however was the Commissioner, who was in the US on official business. While she sent her best wishes, it was left to Policing Authority boss Josephine Feehily to give the keynote speech – a fact remarked on by many as potentially significant. During it she called upon Chief Supt Pat Leahy to come up, and she congratulated him on his appointment as Assistant Commissioner. The next day, the policing authority made a more formal announcement of the promotion. Was this a real changing of the guards moment? THERE were certainly elements of Driving Miss Daisy surrounding the two day grand tour of Kerry by Shane Ross, pictured left, in which local leader Michael Healy-Rae did the driving and the talking. Afterwards, one happy mandarin noted of Transport Minister Ross that ‘he returned back shaken and stirred’. A real Bonding experience then.