Chit-chat’ turns to heated exchange

Harry McGee, Political Editor

Sounds like a Brazilian samba from the 1950s, but it was all the fashion around Leinster House in the late 1980s.

An unsuspecting minister would be coming back to the Blue Corridor after Question Time. Another of the ministers would jump out from his or her room, usher in him or stop him on the corridor, and before you the visitor would know it, he'd be shaking hands with virtually the entire frontbench. And before he'd get a chance to draw breath, they'd have vamoosed back into the ether.