Mick Clifford: Jesus was born at home with not a donkey in sight

Children from the YMCA Creche Aungier Street, Jayke Meehan, 4, and Arlo Egan, 4, during the official opening of the Live Animal Crib sponsored by the IFA at The Summer House, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Picture: Gareth Chaney/ Collins 

What about the childer’? So went the cry of faux outrage a few weeks ago when it was announced that the crib in Dublin’s Mansion House would be without live animals. The city’s lord mayor, Caroline Conroy, decided that plonking farm animals in the city centre for a few weeks was not a good thing, for either the animals or the childer’.

Junior minister Patrick O’Donovan was having none of it.