The Blarney Stone in Cork, Ireland is said to confer on those who kiss it the 'gift of the gab' - a facility with the spoken language that is a preserve of the Celts.
If a recent press conference is anything to go by, the Irish journalist Vincent Browne has certainly had his lips round those ancient battlements.
At a press conference in Dublin last week, Browne, who has his own late-night show on TV3, asked a seemingly innocuous question on the terms of the ECB/IMF bailout of the country’s financial system.
When he was fobbed off with bland technocratic platitudes by the ECB’s Klaus Masuch, Browne pressed home his point and insisted the German explain the rationale behind the bailout of Anglo-Irish’s unsecured bond holders to a hypothetical Dublin taxi driver.
What follows is TV gold.