Devil’s Dictionary for pragmatic mavericks, spin doctors and lobbyists

There has long been a need for an Irish political version of Ambrose Bierce’s famous Devil’s Dictionary.

What follows is a first installment. Suggestions for additional definitions will be welcomed

Annual Conference: A once-yearly opportunity to up-end the principles of hospitality; you get to invite ministers, be rude to them in your speeches, then heckle and hiss during theirs. Ministers would love to stay away, but are afraid they'd be called cowards.

Apolitical: How Fine Gael voters describe themselves to Fianna Fáil canvassers.

Best Practice: Phrase used, particularly in the healthcare sector, to get extra brownie points for doing your job the way it should be done. The fact that you can have best practice and a simultaneous spectacular cock-up is a modern version of the old tradition that 'the operation was a success, but the patient died.'

Coming Down the Tracks: Phrase used to threaten Bertie Ahern with extinction. Based on black-and-white movies like 'The Perils of Pauline' where the heroine is tied to the railway line as an express thunders towards her. Used so often without (so far) any result, it has a tired air.

Consultative Process: The equivalent of the boxer who warmly hugs his opponent to prevent his opponent knocking hell out of him. Micheál Martin does this a lot. It gets wearisome to those who like the odd flash of dictatorship. On the other hand, if Don Quixote had initiated a few consultative processes with those windmills, his political advisor, Sancho Panza, wouldn't have had to replace so many lances for him.

Diary: What every politician fears every other politician may be keeping and might someday publish.

Doorstepping: A media version of "Boo, gotcha!" Usually takes the form of TV3's raging redhead running alongside ministerial cars yelling accusatory questions while the ministers inside the cars read folders as if their lives depended on it, or talk earnestly into mobile phones to nobody in particular.

Government Jet: A case study in lousy PR. It goes like this: you wait until the economy turns its nose down, then announce you're buying a new jet. When media and the public go mad, you make photo-opportunities of each time the existing jet breaks down, to prove the new jet is really, truly needed. Media and public are unimpressed. The economy turns its nose further south. At which point you announce you're not going to buy a new plane after all. This U-turn has no positive outcome, because everybody is now convinced you woulda if you coulda.

Intern: Youthful sexual temptation cast in the path of politicians. Easily identifiable by the distinctive blue dresses and flashing thongs. Applies only in America.

Land a Punch: Media cliché, usually applied negatively to the opposition.

Leader's Questions: An opportunity to see Bertie Ahern driving the opposition bananas using a photographic memory and a folder. The devil is in the details, and so is the Taoiseach.

Lobbyists: People who are paid a fortune to get you a meeting with a minister. The lobbyist attends the meeting with you and is first to be addressed and embraced by the minister, to indicate that even if you get shag all out of the encounter, you wouldn't have got it at all if your lobbyist (retainer, 75k per year before he/she sneezes) wasn't well in with the minister.

Local Elections: Phrase like 'Santa Claus is coming' used by political parties to warn their own members that they better not pout, because they mightn't get onto the local authority, and by media as a threat to a government they're tired of: "This will all come out at the Local Elections."

Maverick: Euphemism describing a verbally incontinent backbench nonentity with delusions of grandeur. The euphemism is a payoff for the fact that the nonentity can be prodded, on days when there isn't much happening, to attack his/her leader or party, thus allowing journalists to create news.

Methane Gas: A toxic emission generally associated with the business end of cows, but according to the Minister for Justice, also a by-product of pond-life and The Star newspaper.

Northern Ireland: Place where they use up-and-down inflections to make murder and mayhem boring. The Taoiseach loves anything to do with it and can't be beaten on it. Enda Kenny has copped on to this and has cut back on the opportunities Fine Gael used to keep handing Bertie Ahern on a plate.

Plinth: An oblong of concrete on the Kildare Street side of Leinster House, where Charlie Bird gets excited.

Pragmatic: The ultimate Fianna Fáil virtue an infinite capacity to keep one's knickers in an 'on' position. Helped by short-term memory loss of any set-back. Fine Gael are not good at pragmatism. If you creep up behind a Fine Gaeler and yell "Michael Lowry" or "Liam Cosgrave, Junior" at them, they come over all mortified.

Prosecute: What everybody does, currently, with ideas and wars. Not so long ago, countries waged wars, but Gulf II, the sequel, was prosecuted all the way.

Rumours: The lifeblood of politics.

Soundbite: A skilled succinct summation of a more complex reality, usually within fifteen seconds, mostly for the TV cameras. The opposition attack the Government for creating a "soundbite culture". The Government attacks the Labour leader for the same thing. Soundbites are widely seen as a bad thing. This is wrong. "Veni, Vidi, Vici" is one hell of a soundbite. Churchill's "An iron curtain has come down over Europe" is another. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" is a third.

Spin Doctor: A mysterious parliamentary version of the Phantom of the Opera. What the opposition thinks the Government has too many of, what the Government denies it has ever met, what no consultant ever admits to being and what no journalist ever acknowledges being spun by.

Tribunals: Modern version of the stocks. The stocks held miscreants with their hands dangling while the public threw superannuated tomatoes at them. Tribunals hold miscreants with their bank accounts dangling while Joe Taylor learns their mannerisms to mimic them on that night's Vincent Browne programme.

Vibrant: Kiss-of-death adjective applied by dying political parties to themselves.

Vindicated: A word much favoured in the Fianna Fáil lexicon. Has the same meaning as the old Scottish verdict of "Not Proven".