Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I goose-step around the place and do all of these things. All of this is written by people who have, apart from access to columns, little or no talent in life, apart from inhabiting houses of poor design quality and so on. I think it was in a controversy between Denis Franks and Ulick O'Connor that one of them likened the other to a sparrow picking at the droppings behind the dray horse of Irish literature. I often think that if some of the people who write these columns had to fend for themselves in the real world — if they had to manage a small section of a company or sell their opinions in competition with others, or if their slot came up for tender every so often or they did not have an inside line of access to the editors or proprietors of newspapers — they would not be touched by anybody. They are profoundly boring people in many respects.