In polls and at dinner, people ask should they stay or go?

Pat Magner was getting stuck into the dinner when the protesters started banging on the restaurant window. Around him, diners at the Labour conference lowered knife and fork, momentarily arrested by shock.

Not Magner, this old dog who has travelled the hard road with the party. He kept horsing into the carvery, a perfect gesture of defiance, until somebody came along and pulled the blinds, cutting out sight, if not sound, of those who would interrupt a man eating his dinner in the middle of the day.

Magner’s carvery was a metaphor for the overriding theme at the Labour party conference in Killarney. Defiance permeated the meeting rooms and conference halls of the INEC where 600-plus delegates congregated.