Mick Clifford: Foul play in the Dáil? Micheál Martin’s Irish dribble leaves everyone confused
Micheál Martin and Mary Lou McDonald during the final TV leaders' debate in Dublin last year. The Taoiseach has said he did not accuse Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald of 'telling lies', but of 'telling untruths'.
Would Micheál Martin ever have made the grade for Real Madrid? The Taoiseach comes from a line of goalkeepers, including his older brothers Sean and Paudie, not to mention his son Micheál Aodh, who plays between the sticks for Cork’s senior footballers. The man himself didn’t possess a safe pair of hands on the football pitch whatever about the political arena.
The Real Madrid connection is not concerning footballing ability or temperament but language and how it can get lost in translation. The Taoiseach’s kindred spirit in such matters is one Jude Bellingham, an Englishman in Madrid.
Bellingham is 21 and already a footballer of serious repute. In the course of a league game in Spain last week, Jude lost it over a disputed decision and turned on the referee, a man by the name of Jose Luis Munuera. In his native English, Jude either said “fuck off” or he said “fuck you” to the ref. Senor Munuera quite obviously said to himself “fuck this for a game of soldiers” and issued Jude with a red card. The big issue is what was lost in the translation.
Spanish football authorities take dissent and what we used to call downright cheek seriously. If a player says 'fuck you' to a ref, it can attract a 12-match ban. For non-football people, this would be the equivalent of sentencing Mattie McGrath to a year of silence.
If, on the other hand, what passed between the English player and the Spanish referee was the benign version, then it’s not so bad, as the sentiment expressed might equate to saying something like “Would you ever fuck away off out of that.”
So debate raged for the first half of this week on what was said and what was meant and whether what transpired was an expression of frustration or an angry insult issued in a foreign language.
By Wednesday, everybody chilled out a little and Bellingham was given the benefit of the doubt. He received a two-match ban rather than the dreaded 12. No doubt, his reaction on receiving the news was “Thank fuck for that”. And what has all this got to do with the Taoiseach?
During a Dáil debate on the housing crisis on February 5, Martin tried on a mockyaye impression of Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh by flowing from English into Irish and back again. That is the benign interpretation of what occurred. Responding to Mary Lou McDonald’s latest expression of outrage, the Taoiseach got to his feet and kicked off with this: “Ar dtús báire, is oth liom a rá go bhuil an Teachta Dála ag insint bréaga arís.”
This, subject to dispute from scholars of the Irish language, translates as: “Firstly I have to say that the TD is telling lies again.”
One theory has it that he was attempting to suss out whether Mary Lou, the leader of a self-styled Irish Republican party, had a proper grasp of the cultural beacon that is the native language. In any event, that didn’t matter because seated beside her was Pearse Doherty, who apparently qualifies as what is referred to as a “native speaker”.
Needless to say, the Shinners were outraged that their leader could be accused of such disrepute in a chamber for which Irish men and women had died for the right to speak.
A demand for action was directed at the ceann comhairle, Verona Murphy, or, if you will, the Dáil’s sub for Spanish referee, Senor Jose Luis Munuera. Mary Lou appealed to the ref. The ref, unfortunately, was completely lost in the translation. Senora Murphy, it turns out, doesn’t speak the native lingo and couldn’t confirm or deny that the Taoiseach had erred grievously. On the Video Analysis Replay (VAR), the clerk of the Dáil can be seen handing her a sheet of paper, which looks like the transcript of what transpired. It might as well have been double Dutch as far as Verona was concerned.
She asked the Taoiseach that if he had committed a foul, would he, for the sake of the game, come clean.
Mary Lou was apoplectic that the sanctity of the seat of parliament could be abused in this manner. You wouldn’t think for a minute that some years ago she abused the privilege of the Dáil by falsely accusing a number of men and women of criminality and refused to apologise after a Dáil committee confirmed her transgression. The past is a foreign country when high indignation is being invoked in the House these days.
Anyway, as the temperature shot through the roof, the ceann comhairle looked totally lost, as if she wanted to blurt out: “An bhfuil cead agam dul amach”. The upshot was an inquiry ensued which is ongoing. This week we learned that the Taoiseach is now claiming that what he said was that Mary Lou was “telling untruths” rather than saying she was “telling lies”. To which one can only reply, “Would you ever come down off the stage”.
One way or the other it appears that he has now adopted the long-standing Sinn Féin policy of never apologising for anything unless it is absolutely, completely, unavoidably necessary.
Then on Wednesday, another veteran arrived into the melee with his size 10s. Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness was running — and was subsequently elected — for the office of leas-cheann comhairle. This position amounts to being Verona’s sub, or, as football would have it, the fourth official.
In his campaigning speech to the Dáil, he brought up that he was no great shakes with the cúpla focal himself. Then he said this: “I would say to all of the members here that there is no embarrassment about not being able to speak the Irish language fluently and we should try it every time we get the opportunity.
"To be respectful to everyone, however, if you do say something in Irish in the middle of a heated debate, it might be no harm if you repeated it in English thereafter.
"It might avoid a lot of work on committees and debate in this House.”
Ouch. Suffice to say, he has history with his leader.
It would be no bad thing if the Taoiseach just held up his hands and admit he tried to pull a fast one and got caught out. What the whole farrago does show, however, is that there are small mercies to be thankful for.
At a time when lies are not just being retailed, but used to construct, brick by brick, an alternative reality in US, and by extension global, politics, it is reassuring that at least the truth and rules still mean something here. Slán for now.
