SMOKES & DAGGERS

A mischievous mix of (mostly) news

SINN Féin presidential candidate Liadh Ní Riada has said she intends to take €163,000 of the presidential salary, and that the remainder will be returned to the State. Smokes wondered whether this would make her the highest-paid Sinn Féin elected representative, considering the others let the party dip into their pay packets and take home only the average industrial wage. A Sinn Féin spin doctor explained that this restriction would not apply in the case of the Presidency. ‘If Liadh is elected she will cease to be a Sinn Féin elected representative and will be a President for all the Irish people.’ In other words: Kerching! SMOKES hears that at least three Fianna Fáil TDs protested in the only way they could when the Soldiers of Destiny decided to back Simon Harris’s controversial legislation on placing cancer warning labels on alcohol. The lads engaged in a Gandhi-style act of passive resistance by adjourning from the voting to the members’ bar. DURING last week’s downpours a female senior minister left her pink, very feminine umbrella in the doorway TDs go through to vote. ‘I was astonished to see it was gone when I returned,’ she told Smokes. ‘The age of chivalry is definitely dead. I wouldn’t mind but I’d just had my hair done.’ The umbrella was returned.

But the hair-do was ruined. THERESA MAY, left, delivered a zinger of a response to a press conference question from the Daily Telegraph this week: ‘What do you pray for in church, Prime Minister?’ ‘I pray for serious questions from journalists,’ she deadpanned.