The headline refers to some Minister somewhere launching details of the design competition for the new Abbey Theatre in the Dublin Docklands. My advice to the Minister is: duck. After the debacle that was the U2 Tower competition of 2002 and then the announcement last week that a new design by Norman Foster had won some other kind of tax payer funded competition, if I were a Minister, I’d stay as far away from Dublin’s Docklands as Dublin’s useless transportation system will facilitate.

If it's not the Teesh's cue card, it must be a local authority approved newspaper ad... I’m thankful to correspondent Dan O’Sullivan for putting me onto this little story. Within the past few weeks, Wicklow County Council have invalidated seventy – SEVENTY – planning applications because they don’t comply to the letter of Planning Regulation Document S.I 685 of 2006, that piece of uncoordinated mumbo jumbo the Department put out last year without even the expectation on their part that it would ever be read, understood or implemented.

If you thought the last piece was explosive, wait till you get a load of this.Remember in last Dispatch we suggested that there was a plot to undermine the credibility of Tom Gilmartin because of his suggestion that people who had in the space of one lifetime served in a Charlie Haughey cabinet, signed cheques without knowing the amounts they were for, served as Minister for Finance while not having a bank account of their own and who habitually applied their Maleface spEYE Rejuvenating Eye Gel For Men without taking the time to blend it in naturally might have a few credibility problems of their own?

I have it on the most excellent authority that, in the face of complaints that the various tribunals into planning and corruption were costing a fortune and going nowhere fast, but at the same time fearing the outcry which would ensue if they tried to bring the tribunals to a sudden end, former Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, made it a demand of his PD party’s remaining in government after the last general election that Tribunal Justices Mahon, Moriarty, et al be replaced by… Judge Judy