King of the Tweets!

It seems that Green Party TD Ciaran Cuffe likes to make a twit of himself!!

Now, now - before you start wagging the finger at me, I mean it in ‘all the best possible taste’!!

Our little Green Soldier has taken a fondness to the new communication craze that is sweeping the world (but not me, obviously) Twitter!!

Barack Obama is twittering - or tweaking, according to some purists - so is Jonathan Ross and a host of other celebrities. Now Ciaran is a-tweaking.

But maybe he should think twice about where he is tweaking from.

It seems that while Finance Minister Brian Lenihan was delivering his fiscal mugging in the Dail chamber last week, Twittering Cuffe was busy with his mobile phone giving all of his followers an update on what was being lifted out of their wallets.

In case you are wondering, yes mobile phones are technically barred in the Dail chamber. But that hasn’t stopped some TDs from texting people or checking their emails.

Poor Olywn Enright was left seriously red-faced some time ago when an eagle-eyed viewer of Oireachtas Report spotted her texting on her mobile phone while in the Dail chamber and wrote a letter to a certain newspaper about it!

Just before the Budget speech began, Ciaran tweaked that his Green Pary Parliamentary Party meeting was over and he was heading down to the Dail chamber for ‘hopefully not too many surprises’!!

Not long later came the update via text - ‘Oops, press gallery seem to have Lenihan’s speech before we do’.

And then it was onto the finer detail - the doubling of the income levies, the termination of property-related accelerated capital allowance schemes in the health sector, the sitting up of NAMA etc.

To be perfectly fair to Ciaran, he wasn’t breaking any embargoes on the Budget speech by his twittering.

But the blatant use of a mobile phone in the Dail chamber is something that would even leave the fragrant Deputy Enright green - with envy!!