Slaying dragons in the Dail dungeons

“Who‘s going to slay the dragon?” Seamus Brennan asked, a teaser question leading into tomorrow night's episode of Haughey (RTE1). It was 1980. Haughey had, temporarily, stunned his own dragons in Fianna Fail, had been elected taoiseach, then rubbed scales with the biggest dragon in Europe, Margaret Thatcher.

But there were other dragons flapping down to singe Haughey's newly-acquired seat - baleful dragons in the form of the H Blocks, dying hunger strikers ...