An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Sneering Insider.

Too good for him?He shakes his head, mouth grimacing in a sad, patronising “You just don’t understand” frown. He tries to give you a pitying look, as if he is trying to help, but he comes across, instead, as a prick. Which is handy enough, because he is.

He works for “the party”, or as a ministerial adviser, drinking in Doheny and Nesbitts, and is bought and paid for, seeing his job as protecting his political masters from the torch-and-pitchfork bearing little people who “just don’t understand”.  When you ask him why ministers get to keep open their former teaching jobs, or why well-paid public servants can’t just pay for their own pensions like everyone else, he doesn’t even soil himself with constructing a half credible answer. He doesn’t engage or even try to argue a valid if unpopular point of view. He doesn’t try because you are not worthy of it. You are a “civilian”, and the only time he will even half attempt to assuage you is in the run up to polling day. Instead, he points out “that’s not the way things are done”.  In his world, that is an acceptable answer.

He’s lucky he works in Irish politics. In other countries, he’d be found hanging from a lamppost as the presidential palace burns, with the word “traitor” painted on his chest, probably in his own blood. And probably too good for him, too.