SMOKES & DAGGERS
A mischievous mix of political asides with
THAT special increase for top mandarins has opened another Pandora’s Box for our leaders courtesy of… county councillors. Smokes hears their indignation levels went nuclear upon hearing the next secretary general in Health, Robert Watt, will pocket €91,000 more than the last. One minister snapped: ‘Watt is bad enough but a thousand angry councillors giving me grief about top civil servant pay is trouble I can do without.’
SMOKES is pleased to hear Leo Varadkar has a special use for new party chair of Fine Gael Richard Bruton (known internally as Richard the Good). One grinning source said: ‘Any time Leo wants something embarrassing done like returning the whip to the Golfgate senators, Richard is sent on the job. He really is doing an excellent job of being his master’s voice.’
GOOD to see former private schoolboy and current socialist revolutionary Paul Murphy, inset, hasn’t forgotten his roots. He recently asked Norma
Foley about the
‘status of boarding schools, given the general closure of schools announced until the end of January 2021 as a consequence of the pandemic’. The working man, we are sure, speaks of nothing else. A less than sympathetic Foley said: ‘The residential component of boarding schools are private concerns.’
FOR the independent Danny Healy-Rae, it was less a case of the old dog for the hard road than the old phone for the dogged road. Not even the persistent ringing of Danny’s trusty Nokia device throughout his Dáil speech this week could distract him from an impassioned plea for funding for the roads of his native Kerry.