Is it just me or does the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar seem to fear his own citizens more than he does the murderous theocrats of Hamas? Compare the comment he made when hundreds of louts rioted on O’Connell Street last week with the weird tweet he put out when Emily Hand, the nine-year-old Irish-Israeli girl, was finally freed from Hamas’s racist clutches. He damned the Dublin looters as a mob ‘filled with hate’, people who ‘love violence’. And Hamas? What did he say about this medieval terror group that violently abducted an Irish girl from her loving family? Well, nothing.

He didn’t mention them in his tweet. He didn’t say what they did. He didn’t comment on their love of violence. Instead, he coyly said ‘an innocent child who was lost has now been found’. You’d think Emily had wandered off in a shopping mall. ‘Where was she “lost”, Leo? Down the back of the sofa?’, teased Graham Linehan. It is properly disturbing that the PM of the nation of which Emily is a citizen failed to mention that this poor girl was seized from a sleepover with her friend during the worst anti-Semitic pogrom of modern times and then held against her will for 50 days. Why didn’t he tell this truth?