Sunday and other stupid statements from this week

All examples welcome.

Shane Coleman trots this old chestnut out in the Business Post today:

The fundamental question – that people in the media and public life must not shy away from – is who is the health service designed for: the patient or the people who work in it? Because for too long, it has seemed like the answer is the latter, not the former.

Eilis O’Hanlon sets up an unlikely choice: Simon Harris must do more than feel our pain – it’s better to lead with the head, not the heart

Then there’s this:

More than once the Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, has come under gentle fire for his cooking habits. Not because they resemble what we tend to associate with the towering heights of Irish cuisine: boiled cabbage, boiled ham, boiled potatoes. But because they seemingly demonstrate his disconnect with the common man. In May 2020 he asked “what’s for dinner in the Ó Broin household…? Well, oysters/oisre of course!”; in August 2020 he tweeted about slow-cooked beef cheek wellington with porcini mushrooms; a year later he posted a photo of a kitchen table groaning under the weight of what appears to be several types of fish, two cuts of beef and a bottle of dessert wine.

Some seemed to wonder how a man like Ó Broin could position himself as a serious advocate for social housing – in a left-wing party, no less – while entertaining such rarified culinary proclivities? To the so-called food snobs, Ó Broin’s depth of knowledge and curiosity is compelling. To the detractors it is something to apologise for: “A bit crass Eoin” read one response. It seems that liking food and wanting to rectify a housing crisis are anathema. How decadent, and dare we say, European of him.

And lastly this:

Ireland contains only 0.06pc of the total world population. This is smaller than tiny. In chemistry it might be regarded as a barely detectable “trace element”. How do we reconcile this with last week’s achievement of singer-songwriter Hozier’s song Too Sweet reaching number one on the US Billboard Chart? Is this a random fluke or is it part of a pattern?