Senator quit over failure to clinch EU post

DEIRDRE de Búrca was nominated to the Seanad by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in 2007 after failing to get elected to the Dáil for Wicklow.

That she owed her one national public office to such a source and yet now rails against the Green’s becoming “no more than an extension of the Fianna Fáil party” is indeed a rich irony.

It is quite clear, even from her own self-serving account of her departure from politics, that it was prompted by her non-appointment to Maire Geoghegan-Quinn’s Brussels cabinet.