SMOKES & DAGGERS

A mischievous mix of (mostly) news

THE Oireachtas Rugby XV played Dublin Fire Brigade in Donnybrook yesterday, and Leo Varadkar was among the players. Watching on was his former leadership campaign manager Eoghan Murphy. Asked why he wasn’t togged out, the Housing Minister apparently explained: ‘Old beard injury playing up again.’

SENATOR Neale Richmond tweeted a picture of himself, Alan Farrell TD, and Leo alongside former Ireland prop Mike Ross at that Donnybrook game. Richmond observed: ‘Between us we have 61 caps for Ireland.’

SIMON HARRIS’S positivity can be wearying. He tweeted on Tuesday: ‘An exciting morning ahead at the @HealthyIreland stakeholder forum on the built environment.’ Playing fast and loose with the word ‘exciting…

NEITHER Enda Kenny nor John Bruton made it to Leo’s speech at the ard fheis last week. In fairness, everybody was more interested in the All Blacks.

FAIR play to Sky News’s Faisal Islam, who asked a load of British politicians this week to solve his Brexit Rubik’s Cube. Each side had a colour to represent a key party in the Brexit negotiations. So the DUP had its own side (orange, naturally), as did Leo Varadkar (green). Islam explained the central idea to the politicians: ‘The problem is, you move a little bit and it changes the equation for all the other sides.’ Impossible? Conservative MP Gillian Keegan, pictured, cracked it, sort of: ‘What I did with the other ones, is I picked off the stickers…’