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In public he has been a doughty defender of independence, a parliamentary performer not averse to barracking and heckling his political opponents.

The French awarded the doughty little pigeon their Croix de Guerre medal for bravery under fire.

The campaign also exposed the vacuum in our political press corps, which tried valiantly to prop up the Florida governor as a doughty maverick who shouldn’t be underestimated.

“They are the doughty, brave North Korean; the venal and cowardly South Korean, the evil American; and the even more evil Japanese.”

None of these doughty Irish mams, abroad for the first time in their lives, display the slightest curiosity about their surroundings, or indeed anything beyond the horizons of their own tangled histories.