Liam Collins: The most pointless article of clothing in history has met its end

When Chambers later appeared with his coalition and finance partner, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe, neither of the two sported what was once an essential part of the political and business dress code —the necktie.

What if anything does it signify? Perhaps more than just a difference in ages it indicates a difference in attitudes. This less formal attitude to “official” appearance seems to proclaim “because I’m wearing an open shirt, I’m more open, less buttoned up than my predecessors.”

Looking at young (and not so young) politicians and businessmen wearing open-necked shirts left me wondering whatever happened to the tie, a useless but at one time essential sartorial contrivance?

My own aversion to wearing one goes back a long time and tested the dress code in Dáil Éireann.

It happened one afternoon when I wandered up to Leinster House to listen to a debate. At the top of the stairs where TDs enter the chamber there is another entrance for reporters and off that is the Press Gallery in the chamber itself, which is usually half empty.

So if you have a problem with it, take it up with your colleagues, but don’t go back in unless you get a tie

I blithely took my seat and was listening to the debate when the door opened behind me and The Captain, the man in charge of running Leinster House, beckoned me like a schoolteacher to a bold child, to come outside to the corridor.

“You can’t sit there,” said Eamon O’Donoghue, a former army officer. I thought he was telling me I was in somebody’s seat.

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re not wearing a tie,” he said.

“Neither is Tony Gregory (the Independent Dublin TD and the first member who refused to conform to the Dail’s formal dress code) and he’s allowed in the chamber.”

“You are in the Press Gallery and the Press Gallery rules — not the Dáil’s — are that you must wear a tie,” he answered. “So if you have a problem with it, take it up with your colleagues, but don’t go back in unless you get a tie.”

It galled me, but he was right, so I repaired to the bar and had much more fun for the rest of the afternoon.

​I had a similar encounter when I was taken to the Kildare Street Club for dinner. Before taking our orders, the hovering waiter informed me that I must wear a tie and then politely told me he would fetch me a spare one, from a stash that were kept for just such an occasion.

When he brought it back, I was going to do as Sammy Davis Jnr did in a similar situation and tie it around my forehead like a bandana, but I did not want to embarrass my host any further.

As a young reporter, newly arrived in Dublin, I was given the dubious assignment of having lunch with PV Doyle, the founder of the Doyle hotel group and one of the most influential businessmen in Dublin at the time.

It was 1978 and he was about to open Dublin’s most opulent hotel, the Berkeley Court, the following week.

Built on the site of the Trinity College botanic gardens in Ballsbridge, it was bringing international luxury to Dublin and the newspapers were already chattering about its outrageous prices.

Mr Doyle greeted me graciously and shepherded me across the thick pile carpet to the empty restaurant.

“Order anything you like,” he said, handing me an impressively thick menu.

I tried to look as intelligent as possible as I ordered a nettle soup followed by ravioli with a lot of fancy additions, none of which I had ever tasted before.

Then he handed me the wine list, so I did the same, ordering a Chateau something or other, with two names that meant nothing to me.

When the waiter went to hand him the menu PV waved it away and ordered a mixed grill and a bottle of coke, which is exactly the sort of food I was used to.

I just never understood the point of a tie, even though there are still those who think you’re never properly dressed without one

Afterwards he walked me out to the elegant portico and asked, with ultra politeness, whether I had enjoyed my first experience at the Berkeley Court.

Yes, I said.

“That’s good,” he replied, “because it’s probably your last visit, you won’t be allowed in here again dressed like that.”

I looked a bit startled and he added, “Nothing personal, but nobody will be allowed in here unless they are dressed in a jacket and tie.”

As I sat on the No. 4 bus going back into town, dressed in a suede bomber jacket and open necked shirt, I reflected that I might not be allowed back into the Berkeley Court, but at least I had a good story: Top hotel bans anyone not wearing a tie.

PV Doyle continued to enforce the “no tie/no entrance” rule for decades afterwards. Of course, there are those, in golf and rugby clubs, in gentlemen’s clubs and elsewhere, who revel in the dress code of the jacket or blazer and tie.

It is not something that ever appealed to me, I just never understood the point of a tie, even though there are still those who think you’re never properly dressed without one.

I also attended the televised re-opening of the Gaiety Theatre, starring that great actor Peter O’Toole who, much to his and my amusement, left the celebrity audience hissing and booing during his reading of Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Modest Proposal, which advised the hungry poor to eat their own babies.

​It was a formal occasion but I went in a jacket and an open-necked shirt simply because I had not read the invitation properly

“You were the one person the camera lingered on,” said a friend of mine afterwards. And I remember as I walked with all the formally dressed men into the bar at the interval, being congratulated by Michael Colgan for not obeying the dress code, even though it was an oversight on my part.

It is now estimated that only about 3pc of men wear a suit or jacket and tie to work — when they go to work at all these days.

Sadly, a couple of years ago I was stopped by a neighbour whose recently deceased husband was a high-ranking alickadoo in Irish rugby. She had all these rugby club ties that he had been presented with going to president’s dinners in rugby clubs in Ireland and Britain.

She was clearing out the house and wanted to find them a good home.

“What am I going to do with them?” she lamented.

“None of the family want them and the charity shop won’t even take them.”

I was not the right person to ask, and I certainly did not have an answer. But I did think to myself her only hope was the clothes bank.

Nobody wants to wear a tie these days and certainly not somebody else’s.