Simon Harris’s cavalcade of hubris on trip to Áras

Sir, – If this country were a comic opera, it couldn’t attain greater peaks of farcicality than it did on Tuesday morning for Simon Harris’s “coronation”, not unless the libretto involved Spike Milligan and a pantomime horse. In 40 years of driving in Dublin, I have never experienced a more glacial movement of traffic than that which resulted from the Garda Síochána’s closure of Merrion Square to facilitate this buffoonery, and I’m old enough to remember what used to happen to the city on December 8th every year. Tectonic plates move faster. I finally arrived at my destination two full hours later than normal because of this absolute skit on the concept of traffic control, and I’ll lay odds that thousands of employee hours were lost across the city, along with hundreds of bus and Luas journeys and school and college classes, too.

What next in this cavalcade of hubris? How about a detachment of French cuirassiers trotting through Stoneybatter in front of the Taoiseach’s car on the way to the Áras? Because the pretension of that could not be any more bizarre than what happened in Dublin. A more cynical man might ascribe the closure to a political class so terrified of the people they’re supposed to be representing that they’re afraid to allow any ordinary citizen within shouting distance of Leinster House, but since that would actually indicate they have some idea of what the public is thinking, we can take it as read that it’s not the reason. – Yours, etc,

DAVID SMITH,

Swords,