Nuance is lost amid the Twitter storms

A FEW months ago in this slot I wrote the following about Nóirín O’Sullivan: “She could well argue that her biggest problem is dumb luck. If she had been commissioner at any other time in the force’s history, she might well be considered to be doing a fine job.”

The premise for such a statement was that the force was going through enormous change, decades old cultural chickens were coming home to roost and Ms O’Sullivan was having to deal with a new reality that would have been alien to her predecessors.

The day that the column appeared I ran into an opposition politician who stated he was surprised at me. He said that a colleague of his had that morning suggested I had had a “senior moment”, inferring a lapse of reason due to temporary infirmity.