How a leak can become a tsunami with Irish Water nowhere in sight

EVERY now and again, I get to meet third-level politics students. Either they want an interview for their thesis or they attend a masterclass.

A masterclass is academic for “great gas with poor coffee where nobody makes notes, even though in theory they should, and somebody tweets their approval of what they’re not concentrating on”.

At a masterclass at an unspecified time on a forgotten date in a location that’s nobody’s business, I met a group of politics students which broke down, as all politics student groups do, into three unevenly proportioned sub-groups. Sub-group A, the largest group, comprised earnest theorists who could quote every opinion poll ever taken and every policy document ever crafted. This bunch produce matrix-type graphics to show how policy is developed, which matrices have no relation to anything I’ve ever seen in actual politics, but — like a good religion — show you how it should be done if you were a better person and had more time.