`Everyone thinks fairies can cook, but it is not invariably true." So said Senator David Norris, bedecked in blazer and cap a la Capitaine, when he launched a range of frozen herbs for Birds Eye in Dublin last week. He started his speech in Irish, something he says he always does nowadays "because it is the best way to get their attention. They know I am an oddball and then they say `he has totally flipped'." He had always ached to be working class, the senator said, and he never knew what class he was until he was with "the paper bag crowd, of the brown variety, at a meeting of Dublin Corporation and one snot called us `middle-class liberals'."
Singing for his supper, or in this case his lunch, he said frozen herbs were very practical because inevitably you buy too much and end up throwing them away. This went against the grain "because I am a recalcitrant Protestant and I just can't do it. I gave a recipe to the book for St Patrick's Cathedral for Protestant Fish Pie - it had no natural ingredients at all." It was, he said, made up of Smash, processed cheese, Flora and such-like and was a great success for the cathedral. "You can be decently sectarian here in Dublin. John McBrattney is compiling the Dublin Sectarian Cookbook and I am particularly interested in the Anglican Rite - 101 useful things you can do with left-over peas."