Bertie suspicious of socialists' rich pickings

Dang  but Joe Higgins's party supporters are good

Dang  but Joe Higgins's party supporters are good. Rich as Midas it turns out, but who'd have guessed? No vulgar carousing around tents at the Galway Races for them, no siree, but when it comes to property speculation, there's no one to touch them - certainly not the Del Boys of Fianna Fáil.

The startling truth emerged when the Taoiseach, driven beyond endurance by Deputy Higgins's talk about "the big majority of ordinary people who are victims of the \ speculators", decided to finger the real bad boys.

"I am convinced that supporters of my party would probably own less property than the .001 per cent of supporters of the deputy's party, if someone goes to the trouble of analysing the matter," he announced authoritatively.

Now there's an offer for some eager journalist. Wouldn't it be grand to be hand-in-glove with Bertie, analysing the property speculators of the land?

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True, he appeared to qualify this later by saying that "in other countries, those who have leanings towards the far and extreme left are normally the wealthiest in society, while they lecture the rest of us"

But it's clearly well past time for a serious look at those lush ranches around Higgins's heartland of Blanchardstown and Clonsilla, and just who owns what.

Just line up those documents, Bertie, and give us a call.

The downside could be that the topic renders him a mite tetchy.

"Cop yourself on," he snapped at Eamon Gilmore, who was only making a point about the halving of capital gains tax.

The upshot was that the Taoiseach confirmed that he would indeed like to see a referendum on the capping of the price of housing land. But we knew that already.

What we still don't know is whether Michael McDowell in his incarnation as Attorney General was holding Michael Woods's hand when the latter was negotiating the deal on church-State compensation for abuse victims. Micheál Martin laughed at the very notion of a minister "needing a chaperone to go to a meeting".

Bertie told us that when one minister goes out to negotiate, "he doesn't have to bring three ministers with him", which is a mercy when you consider the cost of them. But no one actually answered the question.

As even the sad little troupes of schoolchildren being shuttled in and out of the public gallery know by now, there is any number of ways to avoid answering a question - especially in the seat of democracy.

But yesterday wasn't a complete loss. Olivia O'Toole offered as good an explanation as any for the national malaise. Thanks to the fluoride in our water, the State is on "mass medication".