Harris asleep Young Simon Harris seems to think the women of Ireland will stay loyal to him if he just puckers up and adopts the mantra that it was all an honour and done for Mná na hÉireann. The night before the referendum he tweeted in what is being seen as a ‘Song of the Camino’ moment: “will sleep tonight in the hope of waking up to a country that is more compassionate, more caring and more respectful. It has been an honour to be on this journey with you and to work #togetherforyes. See you all tomorrow!”. Unfortunately no-one cares how well the Minister for Health sleeps, they care how well the mistreated patients under his aegis sleep. And Villager has been struggling to get the image of the eager nightcap-topped and pyjama-ed Simon out of his fevered head. Sinna Gáel Sinn Féin’s new leader Mary Lou McDonald has said it wants to form a coalition government after the next election with either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. “I want to lead the party into government. I want to do that from the strongest possible position. I want us to discuss, debate, agree with others a programme for government”, Ms McDonald told The Irish Times in an interview. All those years, all that effort, pretending Sinn Féin wasn’t just Fianna Gael for slow learners. The view from Dalkey David McWilliams, a metaphorical bow-tie wearer, sometimes gets a hard times in these columns but his Irish Times Saturday feature packs an economic punch and is always accessible and often entertaining and there’s no worthy ideology he won’t eventually come around to or at least promote. But he’s what Villager’s primary teachers used to call a notice box and he’s often wrong. Recently he said Dublin needs to be like Belfast in its policy on high buildings in its historic centre, to avoid a housing crisis. No expert says height is a solution to the housing crisis. The real problem is one of density in Dublin’s suburbs not height in its uniquely-human-scale city centre. Indeed fiddling around with heights sows confusion and is partly responsible for inertia in the city centre as developers wait for ever greater flexibility in standards and correlative extra profitability for their hoarded sites. McWilliams also said people are emigrating because of housing. But Ireland has net immigration. Armchair planning. The view from Dublin’s South Inner City The ascendant Press Up group has outbid several property developers to buy the Celtic Revival style headquarters of New Ireland Assurance on Dublin’s fast-rebeautifying Dawson Street, a more elegant counterfoil to the jaded global offering of next-door Grafton St. The group led by Paddy McKillen Junior and Matt Ryan is paying €38 million for the two interlinking five and six-storey office blocks. Despite helpful suggestions from the Irish Times’ veteran property correspondent, Jack Fagan, Press Up won’t demolish the buildings, but instead will convert the ground floor into restaurant and other retail uses and to add the usual greedy extra office floor to bring the overall office content to 70,000sq feet. In his day Paddy McKillen liked nothing better than a bit of façade-retention but Junior is cornering the market in historic refurbishments with Roberta’s and Dollard in the former Temple Bar printers that Senior (and Bono and Edge) wanted to demolish a decade ago, and the exquisite Art Deco Stella Cinema in Rathmines for which demolition permission had been granted. A bit of authentic taste will get you quite far in sophisticated Dublin now. And if it’s not real, Pressup can elegantly fake it – as with the (actually newish) Vintage Cocktail Club on Crown Alley, and the ye olde Peruke and Periwig pub on Dawson St and Lucky Duck on Aungier St. No pub paraphernalia for these whizzes, as they reportedly prepare for a stock-market otation, but not, Villager is certain, for a downturn. Weird Norman defines normal Norman Tebbit, the former Chairman of the Conservative Party, has announced that he will be boycotting religious services at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, whenever the Reverend Canon Joe Hawes officiates, because the Rev is gay. Lord Tebbit has described him as a “sodomite”, an offensive term. Tebbit, who has been worshipping at the cathedral for nine years, has explained that he finds “it difficult to accept a sodomite as a member of the clergy who will, for example, be called upon to conduct marriage services. I will struggle to attend if he is officiating”. Lord Tebbit discovered that Hawes, aged 52, is in a civil partnership with another cleric, the Reverend Chris Eyden, from a newsletter last March and that he was destined to become the cathedral’s most senior official. “The cathedral has taken this decision and I disapprove of it but I do not wish to damage the cathedral in any way. I will maintain my financial support for it every year because it will be there long after the dean and I are gone”. Tebbit is part of a dwindling generation that deems loving relationships between adults of the same sex to be offensive. What is really sickening is Tebbit’s toleration of an actual sinner, Sir Peter Morrison MP, who served as his Deputy Chairman back in the 1980s. Morrison was a violent child rapist. We need look no further than official British archive records for proof of Morrison’s proclivities. The archives show that on 4 November, 1986, Sir Antony Duff, Director-General of MI5, wrote to Sir Robert Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, after allegations of child abuse had been made by separate sources against Morrison. Morrison had been accused (entirely accurately as it transpired) of child abuse. Duff opined that Morrison was only a minor “security danger”. After the Morrison memo came to light in July of 2015, Armstrong (famed for his use of the phrase “being economical with the truth”), defended his inaction thus: “Clearly I was aware of it…but I was not concerned with the personal aspect of it, whether he should or should not be
