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| Someone looks rather like a naughty schoolboy who just got verbally eviscerated by the headmistress. |
The trips with students meant offering course credit, and
Curmie (unlike some of his colleagues, alas) wanted to ensure that there was a
real academic quality to the process.
That meant not only concentrating on visiting culturally significant
sites in Ireland, but also spending two weeks on campus before departure, not
only reading and discussing a number of significant Irish plays, but also lecturing
on Irish history and society.
It’s said that the best way to learn something is to have to
teach it to someone else… thus, Curmie learned far more about Strongbow (Richard
de Clare), the Siege of Drogheda, the Penal Laws, the Great Hunger (the more
accurate term for what is often termed the Famine), and the Easter Rising than
he’d known prior to preparing for that first Study Abroad trip in 2006. He learned the origins of the term “beyond
the Pale,” and gained a deeper understanding of why an Irishman’s
second-favorite football (soccer) national squad is whoever is playing
England.
Most relevant to this essay, however, was gaining at least
an inkling of how the Irish government is structured today. Most confusing to Americans—or at least to
Curmie—was the function of the President.
This role, like, say, the monarch of the United Kingdom, is largely
ceremonial, while the head of the government is the Taoiseach (Prime
Minister). But the Presidency is not
inherited; presidents are elected by the citizenry for a seven-year term; the
position is limited to two terms of office.
Candidates are, or at least can be, nominated by political parties, but
the position is regarded as apolitical.
When Curmie was figuring all this out, Mary McAleese, a
member of the center-right Fianna Fáil party, was in her second term. Her successor, from the Labour party, was
Michael D. Higgins, whom Curmie admires immensely. He was everything one might want in a leader:
intelligent, thoughtful (in both senses of the term), and resolute. The facts that he was also a poet and a steadfast
supporter of the arts, and that his absolutely adorable Bernese Mountain Dogs—Bród
(“pride”), Síoda (“silk”), and Misneach (“courage”)—accompanied him virtually
everywhere didn’t hurt, either. It was
no surprise that he was re-elected in 2018 with 56% of the first-ballot votes
in a six-way race, winning literally all 40 constituencies in the country.
By the way, Higgins was 84 when he left office, but despite some
health problems, he retained a keen and active mind, in contrast to a couple of
recent octogenarian Presidents on this side of the Atlantic. Replacing a figure of his stature wasn’t
going to be easy. That said, Catherine
Connolly seems very much up to the task.
She had started her political career as a member of Labour, serving as a
councilwoman and briefly as mayor of her native Galway. She left the party in 2006 and has been an
Independent ever since, serving as a TD (Teachta Dála, i.e., a representative
of the lower house of parliament) for Galway West for nine years before she was
elected President.
Her landslide victory in that election in 2025—winning over
63% of the votes in a three-way race—certainly suggested that the Irish public
wanted someone to restrain the power of the Fianna Fáil-led coalition headed by
Taoiseach Micheál Martin. Connolly is self-described socialist pacifist, well to the left of Curmie, who isn’t
exactly a die-hard conservative.
She has been critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
but also of NATO, especially Germany’s plans to boost military spending, suggesting
parallels to the 1930s. She has railed against what she calls
genocide in Gaza, and declared that “Genocide was enabled and resourced by
American money.” She insists that there
should be a role for Hamas in a future Palestinian state.
In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to
legalize gay marriage by national popular vote; in 2018, another referendum
overturned the Eighth Amendment to the constitution, allowing access to
abortion at least through the first 12 weeks.
In both cases, Connolly was a significant proponent of what might be
called the liberal view. Both measures
passed by nearly 2:1 margins, suggesting that the populace might be electing
center-right governments, but there was a streak of left-leaning libertarianism
at play, as well.
Anyway, Catherine Connolly about as far politically from Donald Trump as
it is possible to be. Since his visit to
Ireland was not on official business, however, it was she, not Taoiseach
Martin, who welcomed him to the country, meeting with him at Áras an Uachtaráin,
the official presidential residence located in Phoenix Park in Dublin. Asked in a presidential debate shortly before
the election whether she would challenge Trump about the US support for Israel
and the Gaza War, she replied, “If it’s just a meet and greet, then I will meet
and greet. If the discussion is genocide, then that’s a completely different
thing.”
Well, the meeting this week was in fact just a meet and
greet, but it appears she gave him a piece of her mind, anyway. Here’s her description of what she said:
As President of Ireland, I am very conscious that Ireland and the United States of America are bound by strong ties.
This is a deep connection, built over centuries, which allows us to speak openly to one another.
We are in a world facing the existential threat posed by war and climate change, both of which are inextricably interlinked.
I conveyed the strong view of the Irish people that the normalisation of war and genocide can never be accepted.
As a country which has suffered famine, colonisation and the violence of the Troubles, but also the importance of the long and challenging road to peace, I emphasised the unique insight which Irish people can bring to the resolution of conflict.
I highlighted to President Trump the strong commitment which the Irish people have to international relations, to the importance of the United Nations, including the pride which Irish people feel in Ireland’s contribution to UN Peacekeeping since 1958, and to the obligations contained within Article 29 of our Constitution towards the peaceful resolution of international disputes.
I assured President Trump that the Irish people would strongly support all those who have the strength to build a shared peace in all those parts of the world currently suffering from such horrific war and violence.
One of the leftie sites in this country said she specifically
mentioned “the genocide in Gaza.” That’s
almost certainly what she meant, but it’s unlikely that she’d have been that impolitic.
Anyway, she gifted Trump with a St. Brigid’s cross and two
books: the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (The Voyage of St. Brendan) and the
collected poems of Michael Longley, probably best known for his 14-liner (is it
still a sonnet if it’s not in iambic pentameter? Curmie has seen conflicting opinion on this
point) “Ceasefire,”
which views the Iliad within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. (Side note: Curmie actually once attended a
lengthy poetry reading by Longley himself, but it was several years before that
particular poem was written.)
Those items are intriguing.
There are few things more immediately recognizably Irish than a St. Brigid’s
cross. St. Brendan’s voyage was across
the Atlantic to Newfoundland; the tale thus suggests one of the earliest links
between Ireland and North America.
Longley, who died
last year, was a Belfast-born poet. A
lot of the commentary about that particular book centers on the one poem at
least as much for its title as anything else.
But it’s also worth mentioning that Connolly is outspoken in her desire for
a united Ireland; there are certainly plenty of significant poets from the
Republic whose works could have been used.
By the way, the prospect of a united Ireland seems to be one thing on
which Connolly and Trump agree.
Of course, there’s a lot of speculation from predictable leftie
sources that Connolly was taunting Trump because he is, shall we say, not an
inveterate reader, especially of poetry.
Maybe, but probably not. It’s
certainly true that she’s no fan of Dear Leader, having accurately described him as “volatile” and “acting like a bully.”
But she doesn’t seem to be at all out of step with her constituents.
Curmie acknowledges that most if not all of his Irish
friends are associated with the arts, a traditionally liberal group of folks. That said, both what he reads in the Irish
press and what he observed on the brief vacation in July suggest that Donald
Trump is despised by the overwhelming majority of the Irish citizenry. The huge sign reading “FxCK TRUMP” that couldn’t be missed on the approach to Shannon Airport is also an
indication. The massive protests throughout Dublin were another. The country that has a
portrait of JFK in their newest cathedral, that welcomed Barack Obama (or O’Bama,
as many decided to call him) as one of their own, that restored the cobblestones
at Dublin Castle when they heard Bill Clinton speaking wistfully of them… that
country seems to have little use for this particular American President.
Curmie has indeed loved Ireland for a long time. Maybe even a little more now...
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