Civil servants in the Department of Foreign Affairs celebrated Ireland getting a seat on the UN Security Council with “sparkling wine”, which may or may not have been champagne. The breach of the lockdown rules in June 2020 was exposed at the time by its former secretary general, Niall Burgess, whose posting of a photo of the event (hastily deleted a few hours later) was a self-defeating blunder. Burgess has since been given the plum posting of Ambassador to Paris…

The Partygate scandal in London gave the story some belated momentum, with the result that the Foreign Minister Simon Coveney has “invited” the senior civil servants involved to donate €4,000 to Covid charities. Bet Boris wishes he could bring Partygate to a close similarly…