GEORGE LEE spoke for a mere two hours in the Dáil chamber during his ill-fated eight-month tenure in political life.

A Sunday Tribune analysis of the parliamentary debates from Lee's arrival in the Dáil on 9 June last to his shock departure last Monday shows that he did not speak on two-thirds of the Dáil's sitting days in his short political career. Lee spoke on only 21 out of the 62 days that the Dáil sat while he was a Fine Gael TD.

These statistics are sure to inspire further criticism from within Fine Gael and from across the political spectrum that Lee did not give politics long enough before bowing out.

The Dáil record shows Lee spoke 19,812 words during his time as a TD. Based on the fact that the average person speaks 160 words a minute, that represents a total of two hours and four minutes addressing the house.

Lee spoke on one day in September and one day in January out of a total of 11 sitting days in those two months.

On 17 September, Lee spoke about Nama when he moved to quash a suggestion from the government benches that he was in favour of the plan while in his former job at RTE. On 19 January, he spoke in favour of a Dáil inquiry into the banking crisis.

Lee's contributions were not limited to the economy: he complained to the Taoiseach on 8 July about a newspaper advertisement for 18 bottles of beer being sold for €11.45. Working out that they cost 50 cent each, Lee remarked: "One would not buy a bottle of water for that price" and expressed concern about the dangers posed to young people by cheap alcohol.

Every politician has a bugbear – a gripe or local constituency issue that they keep raising. Aside from the economy, Lee's bugbear was his demand that clampers at a car park in Churchtown pay back all the money they have made from clamping as he had discovered that the car park was on publicly-owned land.