We’re caught in a trap, and can’t walk out...

Given that her fellow junior health minister quit because she could not stand to be in the same room as James Reilly, it was perhaps unfortunate that Kathleen Lynch ended up being stuck in a lift with him.

The pair looked suitably uncomfortable in pictures of their temporary incarceration together, alongside flunkies and journalists.

Dr Reilly was dubbed a “stroke specialist” after former junior health minister Róisín Shortall accused him of practising “stroke politics” in his allocation of health resources, but it was a stroke of bad luck that laid him low yesterday at the opening of a new mental health facility.