Slipping up

How ironic that in an article about slips and errors in recent speeches by the Taoiseach (“Kenny’s got the facts and tone wrong”, Aug 25), Michael Clifford should come up with the wonderful line about “the Blueshirts raising [Michael Collins] to the top of their petard”.

A petard is a small bomb, not a flagpole, and obviously Mr Clifford is disremembering his schoolboy Shakespeare, where Hamlet refers to the engineer being “hoist by his own petard”, literally, blown up by his own bomb.

Mr Kenny will doubtless chuckle at Mr Clifford’s doing of just that.