Wastrel’s Reviews > When Ideas Matter: Speeches for an Ethical Republic > Status Update

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language,
the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and the bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.

"The United States will become very Irish... so an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale... we must gird our loins to encounter the nemesis of seven centuries' misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million people... will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the protestant clergy, rent to the absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made"
(The Times, 1860)

- 1830-1845: 200,000 Irish navvies built 20,000 miles of railway
-in 1846 alone, 280,000 Irish migrated just to Liverpool. 300k the next year. Fewer than half went overseas (mostly America) - the poorer migrants couldn't afford to go on
- 1.8 million in total fled '46-'56; 1m died at home.

It's impossible to avoid the comparison to the modern refugee crisis, and many issues are mirrored (sectarianism, populism, etc)

Higgins likes to use poems and proverbs, in both languages, in his speeches. Here's a couple:

Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
(Heaney)

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left.
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
(Larkin)

And Coventry's architecture as an "image of the state hope argued for" (Hewitt).

Higgins, in his three forewords and first couple of speeches, somewhat blandly but eloquantly stakes out his claim to be the real life Jed Bartlett (though a poet instead of an economist).
It's somehow disheartening: the reminder that the closest thing to a fictional good president is a good president elected to an office with no actual power...