Regina Doherty adopts pugnacious style but Dáil grilling a car-crash performance

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty’s appearance before her own Oireachtas committee yesterday was anything but an embarrassing car crash for her personally.

The minister’s day in the spotlight had been much-anticipated given it was her first such since the release of the Data Protection Commissioner’s highly adversarial report into her department’s public services card (PSC) project. Now the chickens have come home to roost.