Some disgruntlement with Heather Humphreys has surfaced in Gaeilgeoir circles, where memories are long, after the Fine Gael presidential candidate promised to improve her Irish if she wins.
“I passed Irish in my Leaving Cert and, like a lot of people in this country, I went out to the world of work and didn’t use Irish,” Ms Humphreys told Newstalk a couple of weeks ago.
“I promise that if I am elected as president, I will return to the Gaeltacht and I will learn Irish.”
So far, so laudable.
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But there’s a twist: this isn’t the first time Ms Humphreys has promised to learn Irish as part of her public-service vocation. In fact, the former minister for many things was once the minister for arts, heritage, regional and rural affairs and ... the Gaeltacht.
In July 2014, Ms Humphreys, newly appointed to the brief, similarly told reporters that she had done Leaving Cert Irish and then let her language skills degrade, promising to “brush up on her Irish”.
A month later, reporters asked how she was getting on with that at a Culture Night event and she responded: “No I haven’t started Irish lessons yet, but I do hope to get some squeezed in at some stage shortly. I can’t give you a timescale because the schedule is very busy.”
By 2016, she was ruffling feathers among various Irish-language organisations by declining meetings with them, and among the pobal more widely, by declining interviews on Raidió na Gaeltachta, a job that fell to the junior.
“A spokesperson for the Minister said she declined the invitation because she cannot speak Irish,” the Journal reported at the time. It was also noted that she’d spent a week in the Gaeltacht that year, but it evidently hadn’t stuck.
Eventually the Gaeltacht brief passed to others, some of whom could even speak Irish. The Gaeltacht remains in crisis, but at least there’s a Minister who knows the word crisis as Gaeilge (it’s géarchéim, in case you get called up in the reshuffle).
Of course, there’s no particular requirement for presidents to speak Irish. There’s always quoting Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney to fall back on if you need something to fill out a speech. But if you’re going to promise to learn it, you should probably follow through – someone might notice.
Fiche bliain ag fás, mar dhea.
An enlightening tech founder
While some tech billionaires focus on the future, Patrick Collison of Limerick and payments processing company Stripe is devoting at least some of his award-winning brainpower (proven by his 2005 Young Scientist victory) to considering the past.
Amid short posts about business, cryptocurrency, science and politics, this week on social media network X he unleashed 1,790 words on the Irish Enlightenment, encapsulating intellectual life in the early to mid-18th century.
Highbrow stuff, and not necessarily something to grab the attention of his 559,000 followers. But Overheard is interested in both Bishop Berkeley and what a tech founder might think Bishop Berkeley has to do with anything, so we lit a pipe and settled down in the drawingroom to consider it.
In extreme summary: Hutcheson, Cantillon, Swift, Berkeley and Burke were thinkers of renown in their day but are somewhat lost today: they tackled questions such as “whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?” but the more affluent modern Ireland excludes them from the narrative in history books.
They never influenced Ireland at the time, says Collison, but they did influence Adam Smith, the US founding fathers, Voltaire and the Austrian school of economics, who in turn influenced TK Whitaker, the influential public servant who got the Irish economy rolling.
Silicon Valley being as it is, we couldn’t help but wonder if an AI large-language model (LLM) was involved in the mini-essay – so we asked. Per Collison: “I appreciate LLMs for augmenting research, but never for actual writing. I see writing as a way to structure one’s own thoughts, and I don’t think you can outsource that to the LLM any more than you can outsource cardio fitness to a motorcycle.”
We at Overheard agree.
The annals of two former taoisigh
Former taoiseach and current man about town Leo Varadkar is finally free to let us know how he really feels.
Many of his thoughts on rivals and allies are contained in his memoir, Speaking My Mind, which he launched in the fancier-than-normal surrounds of the National Library of Ireland this week. He was happy to speak on overseas adversaries from the Brexit wars.
Nigel Farage, he told attendees, is jovial and chatty. “It’s annoying how often political demagogues and populists are such good company,” he said.
But Boris Johnson? Not so jolly – more unscrupulous and ruthless, and willing to say and do whatever it took to get where he wanted.
“Johnson is the nastiest person I have ever come across in public life,” he told attendees, to audible oohs.
Meanwhile, Bertie Ahern, former taoiseach and current former potential presidential candidate, has opted for a more Collison-like approach in his retirement, tackling the dusty tomes.
“I spent Covid studying the Annals of the Four Masters,” he told the launch of the book Memorialising Emigré Dignity about St Anthony’s Irish College in Leuven recently.
“I’d like to say it was a good read. It was a tough education, three hours a day during Covid, but I did get through all volumes by 2023 which I am very, very proud of.”
The annals run to more than 4,000 pages, covering thousands of years, telling the history of Ireland from exactly 40 days before the great biblical flood to the death of Hugh O’Neill in Rome in 1616. We await his mini-essay summarising the contents.
Useful Áras experience?
What did we learn about the presidential election from the financial returns of residential management companies in Rathfarnham, Dublin 14, this year? Not an enormous amount, if we’re honest, but not nothing. For Jim Gavin, decorated former Dublin manager and anti-triple-lock Fianna Fáil presidential candidate, is on the board of one.
With two other directors, he oversees the maintenance of the common areas of a housing development, eating more than €6,000 of its reserves this year on such pressing matters as “maintenance” and “landscaping”. The sinking fund is still in decent shape, however, and the eight households involved can always be further tapped if Japanese knotweed shows up on the lawn.
This could be useful experience for the Áras, which just so happens to be a slightly creaky 18th-century building on 130 acres of parkland and gardens, including functioning pear-juice production and various biodiversity initiatives. The presidential greenery has cost over €96,000 to keep in shape in some years. But luckily the President has more households he can tap for cash if necessary.
