Paul Murphy Raid: Were the dawn swoops really necessary?

The most disconcerting fact to emerge from yesterday’s dawn raid on the house of a TD is that Paul Murphy wears pyjamas.

At least, that’s how the cops found him when six of them barrelled through his front door at 7am. Murphy has cast himself as a defender of human rights, elected to break the law in a state that, to his mind, is governed with a bogus mandate. How then can he wear pyjamas at night? You wouldn’t have found Mick Collins togged out in jimjams when a nocturnal visit from the state was a constant danger. Martin Luther King might have donned night-time apparel during lulls, but surely not when a campaign was in full flow. Yet here was this representative of the people, hauled from his beddy bye-byes, kitted out in pyjamas.

Worse again, he was still in the jimjams at 7am. What time does this fella get out of bed? We are told all of our TDs work round the clock, yet here was Mr Murphy having a lie-in of a Monday morning, and the week ahead waiting to be attacked.