-Tubbs: Look Edward a shooting star. Should we make a wish?

-Edward: Yes Tubbs, wish for an end to this plague of strangers, for our futures to remain local and for new road to be totally destroyed.

I have had the dubious privilege of witnessing this kind of behaviour first hand on many occasions. Someone whose sense of themselves is so bound up with the inbred nativist nationalism that prevails in this country, that when they get confronted with any kind of plain speaking to which they are not accustomed, they reflexively turn the focus onto whatever it is that makes the person different from them: would I be right in thinking you wouldn’t be from these parts, begob, because this isn’t the way we say or do things round here.

The intent is to undermine the other person in the eyes of everyone else, to make them feel like they have no right to be saying what they’re saying, that they are a sort of unwelcome foreign body, unused to our noble and established ways.

In this case, it’s only the head of government, the bould Enda. What a rancid, dandruff-strewn hole these gobdaws have made.