DeValera's Revenge

The big news theme over the last week has been Dubya's summitry. Watching his trip to Ireland had us invoking the expression You'll Never Beat the Irish -- and not in our standard cynical way either. Because to their credit, it looks as if those Irish who put their mind to it did manage to needle Dubya quite effectively. There were three incidents.

First, widely noted, was RTE's Washington correspondent, Carol Coleman, being combative with Dubya in what he expected to be his standard 15 minute scripted interview with a journalist from whatever country is next on his itinerary. Instead it became clear that Ms Coleman saw that she was just getting the rote answers to the previously submitted questions -- a White House requirement -- and tried to interrupt to get in some followups before Dubya could run out the clock. He did manage to run out the clock, but looked sullen doing it. Which is more than the great Saint Tim Russert of Buffalo ever managed with Dubya.

Second, a quick photographer managed to catch the Emperor in his white undershirt** closing the curtains at Dromoland Castle, the Irish golf resort chosen for the next summit after the G8 summit held at the Georgia golf resort (the one at which Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore the yellow trousers).

And finally, DeValera's revenge. The world will know DeValera as having the face of Alan Rickman, reflecting Neil Jordan's little extra dig (on top of the Michael Collins screenplay itself) of having Dev, the self-styled personification of Irish nationalism, played by someone noted for his portrayal of English-accented bad guys. Dev's heartland is Ennis, County Clare, just a few miles from where the EU-US summit was taking place. And Bertie Ahern had spent the whole weekend working on getting DeValera spinning in his grave. On the Friday, he held a news conference with Tony Blair and bantered with the assembled English hacks about his support for the England soccer team (which he justified by his support for Man Utd) and his belief that they had a goal unfairly disqualified in the defeat to Portugal. Which they had, but is this a fit topic for a news conference?

And from there it was down to Dromoland to meet the arriving Dubya. On Saturday, Dubya and Bertie were due to give the triumphant post-summit news conference at 1.30pm Irish time. Strangely enough, the seven-point summit declaration had already been released long before the summit had concluded, but the photo-op gods must be appeased. As the time approached, the cameras were trained on...the empty seats where the Washington "press corps" was supposed to be, in their usual roles of providing an appearance of an audience and asking fawning questions. The minutes passed, and still no hacks. Eventually word came that a sit-down protest had delayed their arrival from Ennis, where they had been staying and from which they were being bussed to Dubya's bubble.

The buses finally arrived about 45 minutes late -- delaying Dubya's departure for Turkey, and we laughed and laughed and laughed at the site of the besuited "press corps" sprinting up the avenue to take their seats. The poor things hadn't run as fast since the sprint to get copies of the report of Johann van der Smut (aka Ken Starr) into the grave matter of Bill Clinton's affair with an intern. And then the questions to Bertie and Dubya came, and most were about NATO, which was not the subject of the summit, and of which Ireland is not a member, reflecting Dev's constitutional enshrinement of neutrality. We think the protestors had some ghostly inspiration.

UPDATE: The shock of a journalist standing up to Dubya still reverberates through Washington one week later. This Washington Post piece rounds up some of the official fallout, including a complaint to the Irish Embassy. Blogistan followup via Crooked Timber.

**FURTHER UPDATE 21 MAY 2005. Our original link to the Bush undershirt photo was busted and the photo turns out to be incredibly difficult to find on the web. We stated above that it was taken by a photographer but in fact it was a grab from a video camera that was trained at his window. We were reminded to fix this post by a sitemeter referral showing us that people are looking for the Bush picture -- presumably to contrast the White House expunging of it from the Internets with their attitude to the Saddam Sun photos. Our new link doesn't have the Bush shot (which apparently was pulled with legal threats by the Irish EU Presidency) but it has images of newspapers which did run it, including what looks like a fake one.