Derek Mooney

And he certainly has managed to do that here, if not for the general debate and the general discussion, certainly for the Fine Gael candidate in Galway West, who must be thanking him dearly for this one.

I mean, it is just it's just extraordinary that sometimes sometimes former leaders do need to disappear.

No, the amazing thing is what, in Ireland, the mitigation measures are 750 for a population of 6 million.

In Germany, they're 1.7 billion for a population of 84 million people.

So in terms of what we've already done, that's barely sustainable.

So what do you need to do for the next stage?

But I think the issue was, and maybe going back to what Aisling said, which is

that the public representatives, a lot of TDs and others, particularly government TDs, but not exclusively, were flagging this in late March.

We're saying, hang on a second, the £250 million package excludes the agri-sector.

And the government then said after that it would monitor the situation.

That's not responsive.

When the protest hit Dublin on Tuesday, the meetings still weren't taking place until Friday.

So the government reaction didn't appear to be keeping pace with what was happening.

And that's the problem.

It is.

And going back to the points that made Ireland the rest of it, it's also kind of a business community within rural Ireland.

And there's no doubt that when you got beyond the people who were getting the airways, when you got to outside of Dublin in particular, that the protests had a very kind of different character.

Now, obviously, that doesn't include Whitegate.

It doesn't include some of the stuff that happened around Fines and Galway.

But when you got down to Leash, you got to other places, it was a lot more mixed and it was a lot more organic.