Fair dues to the Polish ambassador for coming out fighting over Magda, with his facts and figures in a row.
The three-year old wasn’t so much draped over his mother’s shoulder as collapsed over it, head heavy against her neck, one arm caught in the hood of her anorak, the other hanging loosely.
I HAVE a crow to pluck with the Taoiseach.
ST FRANCIS was just addressing a sparrow as Sister Bird up there on the big screen when a man sat down beside me in the cinema and squeezed my 13-year-old knee. (The other knee was the same age, but he chose to fondle only the one on the right.)
DON’T mention RTÉ’s 50th anniversary to Terry Wogan.
To look at them, side by side, you wouldn’t think they were the same species.
IF I had any influence with the powers that be in RTÉ, I’d get them to re-institute what was once a wonderfully reliable element of pre-Christmas radio broadcasting: something that used to happen on Christmas Eve, EVERY Christmas Eve, around mid-morning or lunchtime, if I remember rightly.
I COULD count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve slept in a bedroom with another woman.
I can’t address last night’s State of the Nation address by the Taoiseach, because it was broadcast too late for this column.
AS WE go to press, the state troopers and the cops are moving, in Los Angeles, to take out the Occupy LA folks. “Take them out” doesn’t mean shoot them.
WHENEVER I’m speaking at a conference, I try to get to the venue at least an hour ahead of the time at which I’m slated to speak.
No woman felt diminished when one of the women candidates didn’t make it on election day.
I WANT to propose a new quango.
WATCHING the elections and referenda from Sweden, where I’ve been working for the last week, I’ve been struck by the emerging myths around the presidential election, the first of which was that “there were no winners”.
TONIGHT’S Frontline is the last Presidential Debate.
IMAGINE it’s 14 years into the future. Imagine that you run a major charity. Or you’re a successful MEP. Or you’re a TV star. Or a senator. You’ve done well, you’re popular, you’re happy.
THE name of the company is irrelevant. It’s a big one with systems.
IS Eamon Dunphy grateful to Gay Mitchell? He should be. He should be SO grateful. There Dunphy was yesterday, in the Newstalk studios, having been turned down by a bunch of presidential hopefuls he had invited onto the programme.
BEING topical without talking about the presidency or the economy requires me to let you know that I was invited to be a Secret Millionaire.
A WONDERFUL moment in a wonderful play. It’s the point in A Man for All Seasons where Thomas More faces the evidence trumped up against him to get him beheaded and rid Henry VIII of a turbulent priest who will not countenance the monarch divorcing his wife.
IF I TELL the truth about being a judge for this weekend’s People of the Year Awards, they’ll never invite me again.
HE WAS racing down a corridor as per usual when he noticed that his left heel was clipping the ground. Intermittently.
THE mayor of New York had a specific audience in mind. That audience was made up of Jimmy Buffet’s “tourists covered with oil”: holiday-makers on the beaches.
HE CAME into office on a wave of promise and promises.
YOUR 2-year-old upends his bowl of soggy cornflakes, putting it squarely on top of his head.
SOME people are really organised.
BY THE time you read this, America’s two big political parties may have done a deal on the economy.
DURING last week’s pinking of Dáil Éireann, courtesy of Mary Mitchell O’Connor, one politician after another, one ex-politician after another, told us we shouldn’t be talking about the Miss Piggy episode.
IT’S completely illogical, but I still have the feeling that there’s a president-shaped person hiding in the long grass somewhere, who will emerge in the coming weeks to a chorus of “the very man/woman”.
LEO Varadkar is extremely witty. To this I can testify, having seen him in action at the Trim Swift Festival at the weekend.
I DON’T know much, but I do know this.
THE redundant “so” is getting to me.
THE prognosis — that he would quickly die of his diagnosed heart disease — was not the worst problem Norman Cousins faced.
IT’S all very well for you, so it is. You can sleep in on a bank holiday.
FOR some of us, the fun just goes on. First, the Queen. Second, Obama.
IT WAS late, for a taking to the church, but still pewter-bright with the promise of rain.
WE MAY claim to be Ireland of the welcomes, but the queen’s visit sticks a shiv right in the middle of that claim.
THEY came into the big room, some of them dry-mouthed with terror, some of them sunny with positive expectations.
ONE of the most interesting aspects of my day job is getting to hear wedding speeches before they are delivered.
THE first time, it could have been a camera angle.
THERE she was in an ad for a chair.
IT’S the mini-budget that’s the focus of my friend’s worry.
YOU spend 14 years of your life on one task.
I RAN into a former Fianna Fáil minister at the weekend.
ANY student of the Kennedy dynasty knows all about the father figure, Joe Kennedy, who shaped and warped the lives of his children through his determination to live vicariously through them and ensure that each should fulfill his ambitions.
PATRICK Honohan is the new Michael O’Leary.
SHE was the first candidate elected in this historic election, coming top of the poll in her constituency.
FOLLOWING Bobby Kerr on any platform is the gig from hell. Following Bobby Kerr when you’re so awash in germs that breathing feels like trying to inhale through particularly thick porridge is even worse.
IF, the day after tomorrow, people can quote something either of the two leaders said tonight, that’s a major victory.
THE first time I met Micheál Martin, I was certain he would become leader of Fianna Fáil.
IF you have loins, prepare to gird them now.
THE Constitution of any country is crucial, both in its letter and in its spirit.
THE opposition are now in charge in Dáil Éireann. That’s the immediate outcome of the Green Party action yesterday afternoon. Without the junior partner in Government, Fianna Fáil does not have the numbers to do anything without prior opposition permission.
DESPERATE distraction, all this Fianna Fáil leadership stuff, isn’t it?
DON’T know if I can stand the pressure.
THE snowploughs were still out, but in single file, not battalions.
I WOULDN’T describe it as a panic attack, but it was one, really.
I ONCE had a boss who didn’t believe in departing staff working out their notice.
I HAVE always thought Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer needs someone to plant a corrective foot in his furry nether parts.
THE fact that Ray Foley is a Twitter quitter just might start a trend.
AND then came the snow. Saturday night was still and windless. It was then the snow came, dry and persistent, layer on layer, covering and outlining and transforming everything in crisp perfect whiteness.
STICK with me for just a few short paragraphs.
THE statues go first.
WHEN only six days are left, that’s when it usually starts.
AS the woman opened the bedroom door to let the two young doctors in to see her sick husband, one of them put his arm out to halt the other.
YESTERDAY’S Sunday Business Post opinion poll wasn’t that exceptional.
THE voice on the phone asked if I was me.
THE man on the radio had a funny voice. Funny peculiar, rather than funny ha ha.
SOMEWHERE in the last few days, someone pressed the optimism button.
WEREN’T we given a great choice by those two opinion polls, all the same?
BEFORE we get stuck into the coming week, how about we nail some of the myths that sprouted from the events of last week?
I TAKE issue with points made on this page last week by fellow columnist Stephen King.
THE passion thing is getting to me.
IT’S no more than a possibility, but a possibility it is, nonetheless.
CONSIDER this as a public relations strategy.
WITH all these cheap air flights to European capital cities, I’m a bit surprised that the Child of Prague hasn’t made a big comeback.
When she was driving the Lexus into the last parking space, she noticed the woman with the platinum page boy hairdo.
SO FAR, the score is one Waterford Glass tumbler, two plates and a cereal bowl.
No matter how many months he had been sober, no matter how, objectively, he knew that drinking was the road to hell, the visceral craving for alcohol overcame his resolution and he repeatedly relapsed.
YOU remember the pictures. Of course you do. Guys in good business suits, standing on the sidewalks of American cities, selling apples. It was the definitive visual representation of the onset of the Great Depression.
ALISTAIR CAMPBELL, in person, is taller, funnier and infinitely more charming than he is in print.
YOU have to ask why on earth General McCrystal agreed to have a journalist embedded with him for eight weeks.
‘MY GRANNY doesn’t like you,” the student at the book-signing blurted out.
YOU have to hand it to the spin doctors who work for BP.
THEY thought she was the bee’s knees, did her parents, and they did their best to make her the cat’s pyjamas, too.
WHEN the organisers contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in doing workshops at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week, I thought about telling them I would consider it, but I was afraid they’d go off me and get someone else, so I said yes with such speed, it came close to tearing their arm off at the shoulder for the chance.
The black box recorder, already recovered from the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 that crashed at India’s Bajpe airport, will reveal the split-second decision-making which caused it to overshoot the runway and burst into flames.
THE JNLR figures are heart- stoppingly important to a tiny minority of the people of Ireland.
THIS is about a dead cat. No more. No less. In the great scheme of things, it couldn’t be less important. Just a dead cat.
THE “wow” that greeted the news of Fianna Fáil being beaten into third place by Labour in the Sunday Business Post’s RedC poll was an odd “wow”.
BIG debates between party leaders may create headlines and lots of commentary, but they’re a complete waste of time.
SO THERE I was in Croke Park, to do workshops for Australians and New Zealanders who advise people on investments and pensions.
WHEN the little old lady barred my way in the confectionery aisle of SuperValu, I thought she wanted to know where the chocolate malted milk biccies were or to get me to read aloud the ingredients in the tiny print on the back of a package.
QUOTE sluts, in the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, were the people outside of the administration who could be activated to come out in support of an emerging policy or make a statement helpful to the president.
WHERE I work, we figured we’d do well out of having to change the clocks to summertime this weekend.
IT IS very funny and it gave me nightmares.
NOT reading X-rays is bad enough.
MY hairdresser lifted up the back of my hair and made a low moaning sound.
Every day she lives, she regrets that she didn’t kill him.
I WOULD love to be communications advisor to the bishops.
THE consensus arising from the departure of George Lee, contributed to in a minor way by the exit of Déirdre de Búrca, is that the political system has failed. Never was a consensus more wrong. The events of the last week demonstrate the political system working beautifully.
THREE years ago we bought a Martello tower, because we’re nuts.
GREEN shoots? I have them.
CHAIRING the Four Angry Men in the Opera House on Thursday last was a fascinating experience, not least because they played to a packed house.
WE in Ireland have a general response to external disaster such as the earthquake in Haiti.
IT’S the level of treachery from the AA that’s getting to me, and, if the Met Éireann forecast is accurate, we’re due a lot more of it.
A WRITER named Ambrose Bierce, some considerable time back, published a wry reference book entitled The Devil’s Dictionary.
GIVEN the capacity of every mobile phone and computer to provide you with a diary application these days, you would think that diaries in the physical sense would be dying off.
I AM going to choke the girl who sings the ad for the sat nav gadget.
THEY’RE cheap; they’re pretty; they’re conversation-starters; they’re useful.
ONE of the sure-fire stocking-stuffers this Christmas is a little paperback called My Mother Always Used to Say, a collection of truisms gathered by Valerie Bowe, with all proceeds going to charity.
NOW, class, settle down. Settle down.
Elite panic is the fear engendered in the governing classes that a natural disaster will provoke the non-governing classes to get above themselves, will release them to loot, murder and pillage, and generally, in the absence of normal restraints, reduce society to chaos
She went off to Australia. Back then, emigration was just fun. Now, as part-owner of a house worth nothing, a massive mortgage, three children and parents whose health deteriorates by the day, emigration not only doesn’t look like fun, it doesn’t look possible.
I WANT an early doors closure on the elephant in the room.
WE WON’T start with the garlic.
Admit it, even the thought of garlic first thing on a Monday morning is unwelcome.
ABOUT 10 days ago, a rumour started about the EU Commissionership.
In a war, if you wanted to take the Isle of Man, you’d just have to point Maeve at the Isle of Man and it would be yours by teatime
THE great thing about the offspring’s visit this weekend was that it eliminated any possibility of reading newspapers, thereby removing the need to take a stand on Pat Kenny’s salary, John O’Donoghue’s expenses or Batt O’Keeffe being U-turned by the Green Party.
She said the Duke of Wellington groaned over her for hours, which is surprising, given his verbal brevity in all other aspects of his life.
IF YOU want to lead the next generation of Irish entrepreneurs, then you’d better get your skates on, because you have just a few days in which to get your application on the desk of the Endeavour people.
THE amazing thing is that they did it twice.
ON September 5, 2008, Brian Cowen appeared on the Late Late Show to give his first big interview as Taoiseach to Pat Kenny.
THE sunshine made the photographs of Jaycee Lee Dugard’s prison look better than it was.
IT WAS one of those panels studded with the famous, lucid and loquacious.
NOW that women’s boxing is to feature in the Olympics, if the girls with the padded gloves are short of equipment, they should ring Batt O’Keeffe. He has the punchbag thing down pat.
ABOUT a year ago, in the middle of a TV sports report in Florida watched by the man in my life, up popped the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.
ACCORDING to Laver’s Law, I’m dowdy, and you hold the evidence in your hand.
ISN’T it strange that we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but neither a Sister’s Day nor a day devoted to appreciation of brothers?
I WAS so perturbed about the Pope’s broken wrist, I destroyed the bedroom and set fire to my underpants. You may think this an excessive response to His Holiness’s injury, but at least I wasn’t in the underwear when it ignited.
Whether it was his proposed bill on blasphemy or his gangland crime bill, the Minister for Justice’s actions in recent times have proved our national capacity to rush to personal judgment, rather than address the ideas involved
JUST when we thought the summer breezes would blow away some of our recession worries and cheer us all up, another lump of bad news rolls in.
Not so long ago, cancer sufferers pretended they didn’t have the disease. Neither they nor their families acknowledged the Big C. Now, it is an occasion for exploration in books, newspaper columns, blogs or – in the case of Farrah Fawcett – a TV documentary
Just as drinkers are threatened by non-drinkers because they convince themselves the teetotallers are soberly watching them getting pie-eyed, making notes for subsequent use, so the happy-clappy brigade are threatened by anyone who wants to opt out.
On the face of it, the processions and programmes on radio and television and speeches in Leinster House were the outward and visible sign of a nation offering long-overdue vindication to thousands of abuse survivors.
FIANNA Fáil got beaten senseless and the Green Party got beaten nearly to death.
WE lost custody of the garden a couple of years back.
NOT feeling great this Monday morning, are you? Bit of a sore throat and a runny nose?
YOU’VE seen the posters.
What he was at was intelligence-testing on the hoof. If a newcomer, faced with the yokel performance, decided this minister was a gobshite, then the minister had the measure of the newcomer.
IT wouldn’t be possible, these days, and it shouldn’t have been possible even back then.
During the world wars, some of the British towers were turned into observation and gun posts.
BETTER gigs may come along, this year.
EVEN if you didn’t do everything you planned, this Easter, you probably had a better holiday break than did Joe Duffy, who was minding his own business last week when a car reversed into him with enough enthusiasm to break his leg in two places.
Probably the best change of all is the rediscovery of shame.
He’s an accountant. He’s a Corkman. He’s opinionated. He’s an old friend. So when he heard me, on RTÉ’s Drivetime, suggesting that Brian Lenihan should levy enormous taxes on the very rich, it bothered him.
OUTSIDE of the Mafia, the family is the most effective repository of secrets, most of them bad.
Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an ‘up or out’ theory.
WHEN the Green Party asked me to serve as a discount X Factor judge at its party conference this weekend, I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.
THE current bitching about the outrageous salary levels enjoyed by top bankers is an aspect of equity theory, the idea proposed in the mid-1960s by psychologist J Stacy Adams.
No, I don’t know the names of the Brass Neck 10. I do have a list, of course. Everybody does. How many are on your list? Mine has 13 people on it. One way or the other, I’m tearing it up.
FOR some mothers-to-be, it happens in the morning.
ON THIS page, last week, Ivan Yates briefly and facetiously included my name in a list of women to be considered as nominees for the presidency before deciding — as he would — that to put a third woman in Áras an Uachtaráin would be excessive and it was time the job reverted to the male side of the population.
FRENZIED brainwashed loyalists ready to die for their Emperor, they were manic in their patriotic determination to destroy American shipping.
THE cynicism with which the Pope’s venture onto YouTube was greeted is ill-informed.
NOBODY’S sure just how many people are going to form the crush in the Mall and line the streets of Washington for tomorrow’s inauguration.
THE picture was on the right of the front door of my grandmother’s house in Dublin’s Liberties.
Caroline Kennedy identified Barack Obama as a quantum shift in political potential.
YOU’RE not supposed to like The Sound of Music.
ALL I want for Christmas is a prescription for Viagra. I figure my chances of getting one are small, since Irish doctors tend to be a bit limited when it comes to creative prescribing, and also because nothing’s gone right for me with the Christmas preparations thus far.
Throughout the American presidential election ran the constant reference — optimistic, on the part of African Americans — to the possibility of America gaining its “first black president”.
SHE told them to put him in the bath and melted all the jelly she had, poured it into the hot water with which she had surrounded his comatose form, and left it to solidify around him with a spoon on the ledge, together with a note reading ‘Eat your way out’My phone made its text noise when I was starting to cook. I ignored it.
A new defensiveness about employment is changing the way America looks at jobs, illegals, and outsourcing overseas.
He regaled me with his miseries for half the journey, did the taxi man.
MAKING a will is a socially approved of activity like taking exercise. I’m all for it. For other people. It may be irrational to believe that taking exercise or writing a will would kill you, but what about Jim Fixx, I ask you?
Because of the times we’re in, when we heard the company next door was moving, we assumed the worst. In fact, the reason is the best: they’re moving to bigger premises because they’re doing fine, thank you very much.
I’m not suggesting we stop the Irish army doing its marvellous peace-keeping work in places like Chad.
IN THEORY, after the past week or so, Brian Lenihan should be in a corner, wearing a dunce’s cap. But Brian Lenihan may have a touch of Bertie’s Teflon, because, for some reason, he hasn’t attracted the worst of the odium.
IT’S not just the contents of the budget that have landed the Government in the mire. It’s lack of communications planning.
WOULD I have advised Enda Kenny to take a pay cut, all by his little self? Are you kidding? I’d have stayed a mile away from the suggestion, partly because his colleagues were inevitably going to be asked if they’d do likewise and fail to be thrilled by the possibility, but mainly because I know his wife.
GORDON Brown has one success under his belt. He set out to campaign, on Saturday, at the emergency meeting of leaders of the biggest EU economies, for a support plan to shove under small businesses like a sheepskin, so they wouldn’t get bedsores as a result of inactivity during the recession.
IT MADE headlines, but last week’s official permission for us to use the R word and describe Ireland as being in recession wasn’t really necessary, for some of us.
All politicians are losers. Who, other than a born loser, would go into a business where everybody insults you, every journalist tells you what to do, (based on no personal experience whatever) and gloats when you fail to do it, make a mistake, get fat or are clocked speeding?
SPEAKING at two public sector conferences last week, I was struck by a palpable wave of incoming nostalgia. It was like being at an emigrant wake. All present had the sense of saying goodbye — to each other and to the possibility of a similar conference next year.
The man with the sandbags is one of them. He works for Fingal County Council.
“Oscar Wilde devoured and luxuriated in books. When he was sick and when the prison doors were closed upon him, books were the first things he asked for.He turned to them, too, as he crawled towards death in his final years, for comfort and consolation …"
Someone once said that there’s a solution to every problem that’s simple, obvious — and wrong. The selection of Joe Biden as running mate by Barack Obama could be just such a solution.
Michael Phelps has won a lot of Olympic medals. This time. Last time. And, according to himself, will win them next time around as well. The world is so united in praise of the human dolphin, to disagree is to take one’s life in one’s hands.
OUR grandparents used to tell stories of terrifying storms they had witnessed. Beatrice Coogan wrote a novel about the night of the Big Wind, a legendary storm.
She knew where every plant was hidden under the overgrown weeds, and had the Latin name for each. She had a particular hatred for a plant called a Veronica, a low-slung woody bush that would take over the world if you let it. Piles of uprooted Veronicas grew higher and higher.
I’d got to the stage of elasticated waists, edge-to-edge jackets and raucous necklaces designed to distract from the horror lower down, those necklaces matched at the other end by extra-high heels in the attempt to look tall enough to be this fat.
THE motorcade was impressive. The army officer with the white gloves did a salute as the French president emerged from his car.
One of the many reasons no sane person should ever consider politics as a career is that it’s the only profession where ears matter.
The conviction that we can deliver a happy childhood to those to whom we give birth is linked to two other unquestioned certainties: That every child is entitled to a happy childhood.
Action should be taken on this because, unless someone is watching child pornography or snuff videos..., it’s nobody’s business what any of us watch on our computers, least of all a massive entertainment multinational which can make commercial gains from the information.
A FRIEND spent the weekend in Prague and came across open-air stalls in the side streets where they sell old Soviet memorabilia.
Because of climate change, sea levels are set to rise.
IT’S CERTAINLY without precedent. Indeed, it’s hard to believe. But it’s a fact. As far as American media is concerned, the valedictory tour of Europe by President George W Bush is of little or no interest compared with Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.
She made herself sound like someone going for a middle management post in a manufacturing plant, rather than the aspirant leader of the United States of America.
IT HAS its competitors, but the single most overused word in the lexicon at the moment is “passion”.
COME ON, as Hillary would say, let’s get real here. Nobody was surprised the Taoiseach knew that word and could use it.
In my time, I’ve been asked by one politician to deliver messages to other politicians as varied as ‘Your deodorant, assuming you’ve encountered the concept, isn’t working’ and ‘If you think nobody has spotted you playing offside with yer wan, you’re mistaken.’
WE now have a three-tier ministerial system. At the bottom are the soon-to -be-announced ministers of state. At the top are finance, health, education, justice and transport. In the middle are the others, widely interpreted, since Brian Cowen announced his cabinet, as of minor importance, offering damn-all potential advancement to their holders, and awarded either as punishments or consolation prizes.
YOU only have to listen to Hillary Clinton rubbishing Obama’s statement about the unemployed, dispossessed and generally miserable tending to get consolation from their churches and their guns, to understand that you never, ever insult the voters. They are infinitely wise, thoughtful and responsible. OK? OK.
JOHN PRESCOTT, the former deputy leader of the British Labour party, was defined for a time in the public mind by the day he punched a protester at an election rally.
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