Anyone listening to Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTE radio yesterday may have wondered why Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin sounded so confident of their answers. Well, the reason, as I can exclusively reveal, is that they knew the questions beforehand, and their civil servants had already worked on the replies.

This is the type of behind-the-scenes information you can discover when you are accidentally ushered into the wrong room and nobody in that room realises you are a journalist. Despite the fact that you are carrying a shorthand notebook, holding a pen aloft and sporting the desperately hopeful expression of a person needing to wring one more story from a budget that has already been leaked, announced and analysed to within an inch of