The sweetest of Senators

It’s going to be pralines at dawn in the Seanad this session, with two well-known chocolatiers sitting on different sides of the chamber.

It is well known that the veteran Fianna Fáil Senator Mary White has paved her way to Leinster House while showering councillors with Lir chocolates during Seanad campaigns.

And journalists and politicians with a sweet tooth have been delighted to receive little boxes of choccies from her at Christmas.

Now she is joined in the upper house by Mary Ann O’Brien, founder of Lily O’Brien’s chocolate company. Senator O’Brien, who is also a founder of the Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation, is one of the Taoiseach’s 11 nominees.

Another new Senator, Labour’s Mary Moran, won’t forget her first day in the job: she tripped on the Leinster House plinth and badly sprained her ankle. Another first-timer, the hospital consultant John Crown, administered first aid. “He was a dote,” says Moran.

“People were telling me not to do a Mary Mitchell-O’Connor and drive across the plinth. I fell off it instead.”

Moran is one of two Senators from Haggardstown, in Dundalk. The other is Fine Gael’s Jim D’Arcy, who proudly told the chamber, “I am here as a Haggardstown man, a Dundalk man and an Irishman.”