Cute hoor
A cunning opportunist - someone who plays the system, exploits loopholes, and gets away with it without quite doing anything wrong. Almost always pejorative, occasionally spoken with rueful admiration. A fixture of Irish political and business commentary.
Etymology
A pairing of Hiberno-English 'cute' (clever, sly, calculating - the older English sense, not the modern American 'attractive') with 'hoor', the Irish pronunciation of 'whore', used as a generic and gender-neutral person-marker, not as a literal insult. The Irish 'cute' preserves the older sense of 'acute' or 'sharp-witted', often with implied slyness; standard English shifted to mean 'pretty' in nineteenth-century American usage, but Irish English never followed. 'Hoor' as a generic noun is documented in twentieth-century Irish speech.
In a sentence
Your man's a right cute hoor - had the grant in before anyone heard it was open. - a rueful observation
We need a cute hoor in there - that lot would eat us alive otherwise. - a calculated endorsement
Historical notes
Cute hoor is a fixture of Irish political coverage, used for a specific kind of operator: not corrupt enough to prosecute, not clean enough to admire, always one step ahead of whoever might be checking. The phrase carries a peculiar ambivalence - the speaker condemns the figure and quietly recognises a folk-hero in the act of outwitting authority. Charles Haughey was a prototype in mid-century coverage; the phrase has remained current through every generation of Irish political journalism since.