A fistful of dolours...

Straight talking...

- NEIL LESLIE

UP IN ARMS Ireland's richest TD Michael Healy-Rae in show of 'solidarity' with cost-of-living protesters; inset, a tractor decked out with tricolour

IN a week that will live in infamy, it may be the defining image.

Not jackknifed trucks blocking the country’s oil supply from getting to homes, hospitals, schools and businesses.

Or the Gardai and the Army forced to move in and end the tractor siege.

No, instead it was Ireland's richest TD standing and raising a fisted salute of solidarity to the assembled ranks of cost-of-living protesters on Kildare Street. Citizen Micheal Healy-Rae taking his place on the barricades with the little people.

The drug of political populism is impossible to resist for those like the Healy-Raes who mainline it.

The last week saw an Irish MAGA-style brand of the narcotic take hold and spread like a heroin epidemic all the way to Leinster House.

We already had the peddling of false, easy solutions to people's real problems.

We have seen the targeting of convenient scapegoats in a bid to whip up the masses.

And now we have added the final, vital ingredient in the 'MAGA-fication' of the world’s democracies - the direct challenge to law and order by those who favour "might is right" and the rule of force to bulldoze their way to the top of the queue.

On an April week on O'Connell Street, a terrible new Irish beauty was born as they waved “Make Ireland Great Again” flags in the shade of the GPO.

The faces of Ireland's new populist uprising with a creed that it is OK to forcibly seize the levers of power for yourself - run the spectrum from the far left to the far right.