It must be the heat. That’s the only explanation I can think of for this week’s recommendation by an Oireachtas committee, a group of TDs and senators from all parties – that is, not entirely a bunch of mad leftie headbangers – to decriminalise heroin and cocaine.

The five senators and nine TDs, including apparently sensible folk like Fianna Fáil’s Willie O’Dea and Colm Burke from Fine Gael, must have caught a little too much sun before deciding to call for the decriminalisation of all drugs ‘for personal use’. So much for trying to dissuade teenagers from experimenting with hard drugs: the message from our esteemed legislators seems to be, knock yourselves out. Literally.

The argument in favour of decriminalisation, as far as I can tell, is that drug users are clogging up our criminal courts, traipsing in day after day, costing us a fortune in free legal aid, before being sent back out with a slap on the wrist to do it again.

So if they’re going to do it anyway, why not turn a blind judicial and law-enforcement eye to the practice and instead concentrate on helping, supporting, educating, rehabilitating and facilitating users, with more safe injection rooms for example?

Well, for a start, let’s try out that argument on another persistent practice that clogs up our courts on a daily basis – speeding. People are going to speed. They know there’s very little chance of being caught and, even if they are, it’s dead easy to avoid a conviction or penalty points.

All you’ve got to do, it emerged last month, is turn up in court and tell the judge that you didn’t get the fixed penalty notice, which is sent by ordinary post rather than registered mail. They can’t prove you did, so case dismissed. So should we scrap the limits and allow people to drive at whatever speed they like as long as it’s for ‘personal reasons’?

And deciding what exactly will constitute a quantity of drugs ‘for personal use’ is going to be a lot of fun. If a small-time dealer is caught bringing four or five bags of coke to a posh south Dublin party, for example, good luck trying to prove that they’re not just planning a particularly happy solo weekend.

Decriminalisation will mean that gardaí can still confiscate your stash of heroin, ‘molly’ or cocaine, but that’s if they bother to stop and search you at all. And once possession is not a crime, and your surname is not Kinahan, why should they waste their time?

This proposal also makes the great leap of an assumption that your average cocaine user is a tragic addict, simply making a desperate cry for help when they purchase a €100 baggie of Colombian marching powder from their local supplier. They’ll just jump at the chance of detoxing, rehab, support and counselling, the poor lambs. Right.

I’m not speaking out of school here, but I don’t believe I’ve been to a single party involving journalists, lawyers and political types over the past few years where somebody didn’t break out a bag of Charlie. After a while, you start to spot the same people turning up on the fringes of the crowd, always looking a tiny bit out of place, maybe dressed a little too casually for the occasion, and with no obvious reason to be there.

Never mind the bespoke catering, the truffle canapés and the Cristal champagne – having your very own dealer on the guest list is the ultimate status symbol. And since hacks and politicos tend to move in much the same circles in the small goldfish bowl of the Dublin chattering classes, I suspect there are few on that committee who can’t say the same.

There’s a good argument for decriminalising marijuana, since a lot of people get great pain relief and comfort from the drug. Heroin, though, is an entirely different matter, and has claimed countless lives and caused endless human misery since the Dunne crime family introduced it to Ireland back in the late 1970s.

And including cocaine on the list, in my opinion, smacks a little of the notion that People Like Us, middle-class recreational drug users, really shouldn’t be criminalised like smackheads and meth fiends – the odd ‘bump’ of coke or ket doesn’t make you Amy Winehouse, now does it?

Except, much like the desperate addicts shooting up in the alleys, middle-class users are also funding the drugs gangs, their murderous feuds, their obscene wealth and their collateral-damage victims. Our home-grown Kinahans are now one of the world’s biggest drugs cartels. With an estimated worth of €1.5billion, if they were legit they’d be a Fortune-500 conglomerate.

And if they were listed on the stock exchange, the news that witless Irish legislators were planning to decriminalise their product would see their share price soar. Nice work, people.

There may be some bad blood if I don’t get a wedding invite, Taylor... 

Imagine being a billionaire and booking a wedding venue that hosts 22,000 guests? Even your most casual friends and most distant relatives would all be expecting an invite. In fact, given that my daughter once snapped a selfie with Taylor Swift’s mother in Dublin, meaning we’re practically related, my nose will be properly out of joint if I don’t get the nod myself.

According to reports, she’s booked 22,000-capacity Madison Square Garden for her July 3 wedding (that’s next Friday – they probably couldn’t afford to book it for a Saturday). A permit to close the streets around the iconic venue has been obtained, and top hotel rooms in the area have already been booked by the Kansas City Chiefs teammates of her fiancé, Travis Kelce – no Airbnbs for them, then. 

With the venue basically confirmed, the speculation now surrounds the guest list – who will, and will not, make the cut? Ed Sheeran is a definite shoo-in but, after TayTay was reluctantly drawn in to that big legal wrangle last year, I reckon I’ve a better chance of an invite than her one-time bestie Blake Lively. And I have a nice hat, so I’ll keep the date free, just in case.

Fat-shaming is now par for the course 

When he was heckled by a spectator during the US Open this week, Rory McIlroy turned around, eyeballed the heckler – astonishingly for an American golf fan, he was a butterball – and made a domed shape over his stomach with his hands: the internationally recognised gesture for ‘That’s rich coming from you, ya fat git.’ 

There was a time when Rory would have been practically cancelled for ‘fat-shaming’, but the crowd laughed and applauded. And it’s prompted a wider debate as to whether, with weight-loss drugs now widely available, there’s less tolerance of obese people claiming victimhood over the slightest reference to their size. 

Instead of taking offence, it may be time for the calorifically-challenged to arm themselves with a stinging comeback. For instance, when cricketer Eddo Brandes was asked by a frustrated opponent during a tense game, ‘Why are you so fat?’ he famously replied, ‘Because every time I make love to your wife, she gives me a biscuit.’ 

Flying Scot Stewart hasn’t got a lot left in the (oxygen) tank 

Rod Stewart fans in the US weren’t entirely sympathetic when their idol cancelled a show in California just an hour before he was due on stage last week, pleading ill-health. Especially when they discovered that, the following day, he improved enough to fly across the country to Boston to watch Scotland play Haiti in the World Cup. 

One grumbled online that it was ‘rude and insensitive’, but then Rod is 81, and fans should brace themselves for the odd upset to their plans. Especially as the poor chap had to get oxygen after nearly fainting on stage in Utah at the weekend. In pictures from the episode, he finally looks his age, and had to stay seated for the rest of his set. But he did finish it, rather than letting fans down. And it’s not like he didn’t warn them – the tour is called One Last Time. 

Even our prehistoric ancestors knew what a woman is

A burial cave in South Africa, used by our very distant ancestors more than 300,000 years ago, was probably the world’s first ‘single-sex space’, according to researchers.

Because the skeletons of now-extinct homo naledi all looked alike, at first boffins assumed there was little difference between the sexes’ body shapes. But then they stumbled on the explanation – the skeletons were all female. So while modern women have to fight for single-sex spaces against men in dresses, our prehistoric ancestors understood that females were entitled to privacy, even in death. Homo naledi stood about 4ft tall and had brains one third the size of ours, and still they knew the difference between male and female. And we’re the ones who think we’ve evolved.

Jailed for cooking the books 

It was the Le Creuset that did for Peter Murrell, and led to the husband of Scotland’s former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, being jailed for five years this week. Among other high-end purchases, he’d been splurging on the luxury French kitchenware and detectives examining the Scottish National Party’s finances wondered why the hard-up party was spending almost €100 apiece on fancy mugs. 

Turns out they weren’t for the use of the party riff-raff but ended up in the Murrell-Sturgeon household, along with the Jag, the designer jewellery and handbag, the €4k fountain pens, and the famous €3k salt and pepper grinders. But not the €150,000 luxury motorhome, with all of four miles on the clock, which Nicola never saw because it was parked around the side of his mother’s house. 

She was not charged with any offences of course, but it’s funny how she knew where it was parked, if she never saw it…