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With Healy Raes in power, we might get an event centre now

12 1
26.01.2025

English people who move to Ireland often arrive with preconceived ideas of what the locals are like.

The Irish are quick to try to dispel any such misconceptions - visions of bog-trotting ‘Paddy’ with a drink in his hand and a song on his tongue are hopelessly outdated, we are told - if they ever existed at all.

This was certainly the case when I moved to Ireland in 2001, when the country was in the process of reinventing itself. The Celtic Tiger was roaring, and Ireland was projecting itself as a modern, thrusting nation at the pulsing heart of a liberal and inclusive Europe.

It was a vision my Irish partner and her family, and my new colleagues here in Cork, seemed keen to embrace. Old Ireland, the Ireland of shamrocks and pubs, leprechauns and diddly-eye, a genius quote about to trip off the tongue... that was all dead and gone, it was with O’Leary in the grave.

Or so they said.

Then, one day, I saw on the TV news a guy called Jackie Healy Rae in full flow in the Dáil, and I thought, ‘Ha, now that’s the Ireland I was sold. So it does exist!’

The Kerry TD was like a caricature, a ghost of Ireland’s recent past come to life.

Belying the results of the work by that student in the recent Young Scientist Exhibition, Jackie had a big red Irish head on him, with a green tartan hat squashed over it.

He was dressed in fine clothes, but still managed to look like he had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

This guy was straight out of Central Casting.

And, of course, he had the gift of the gab.

One quote of his at the time stuck in my memory, when he........

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