SMOKES & DAGGERS

IRELAND’S favourite senator, Labour’s Aodhán Ó Ríordán, must not have got what he wanted on Christmas Day (say, the 6,000 votes he was short of a quota last time out). On St Stephen’s Day, referring to a picture of Irish shoppers waiting for the doors to open for the sales, Senator Humbug decried it as ‘ridiculous’. ‘No need for stores to have ‘sales’ starting on St Stephen’s Day,’ Mr Ó Ríordán, right, railed. ‘Why not give your workers a half-decent break over Christmas?’ Indeed, Smokes is old enough to remember when St Stephen’s Day was a holy day and shops didn’t open. But that’s all been liberalised, Senator, hasn’t it? A case of meet the new orthodoxy, same as the old orthodoxy? THE news that MI5 wanted the UVF to kill Charlie Haughey was greeted with surprise this week. Charlie’s grandson, Cathal – who is head of the FF cumann in DCU – called it ‘madness’. Imagine, he tweeted, ‘If it came out that the Irish State worked with the IRA to assassinate a British PM.’ Or imagine if ministers conspired to arm the IRA using State funds… ONE of Arts Minister Josepha Madigan’s, right, final Dáil questions as a backbencher was to ask OPW Minister Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran if, in doing up Stepaside Garda Station, ‘provision will be made to make the telecommunications mast aesthetically pleasing’. One wonders what people living in fear in rural Ireland would have to say about that. WHILE perusing a book of essays entitled The Jewish Joke, we found a wonderful anecdote about linguist JL Austin. He was giving a carefully thought-out lecture explaining how many languages employ the double negative to denote a positive, but none employs a double positive to make a negative. His argument was rather undermined by, from the back of the lecture hall, philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, scoffing: ‘Yeah, yeah…’ Had Mr Austin been from Munster, he’d have heard many a local answer an unwelcome request with, ‘I will, yeah…’ meaning a firm no. The school of life, eh? THE past still holds the power to cause trouble. Fianna Fáil’s Éamon Ó Cuív was swift to speak out over the decision to hold next year’s Famine commemoration in UCC – it would mean the commemoration was occurring for a second year in a row in Munster.