Irish people are said to appreciate eloquence. They relish a colourful turn of phrase, a clever riposte, a wicked insult. They treasure a bon mot; a good malapropism or a splendidly outrageous mixed metaphor. This is one of the few countries where newspapers carry long columns of quotations headed "This Week They Said". What makes our phrases and quotations worth recording?
Some illuminate for us aspects of national life and debate. We remember Sean Lemass's comment in 1928 that Fianna Fail was a "slightly constitutional party", because it described precisely the party's constitutional role at the time, and many recall George Colley's (now so prescient) warning in 1967 about low standards in high places because he alone dared voice an unpalatable truth. When justice minister Sean MacEoin expressed a fear in 1951 about getting a "belt of the crozier", the phrase entered our political lexicon because it so aptly described the relationship between politicians and the bishops.
Other quotations betray a certain cast of mind, often unique in its Irishness, such as the 1966 comment by Oliver J. Flanagan, TD: "Sex never came to Ireland until Telifis Eireann went on the air." Trawling through the history of the century one finds many such examples of unintentionally revealing remarks. We know exactly what UVF leader, Billy Mitchell meant when he said in 1975, "I may be a bad Christian but I'm a good Protestant," and how Joseph Murray, president of the League of Decency could say in 1974, "I have received pledges from 2,000 people and two Protestants."
Some phrases bear out the wisdom of Seamus Heaney's advice: "Whatever you say, you say nothing." Among them must be numbered Brian Lenihan's "on mature recollection" which came to signify a changed story. We recall others because we simply enjoy double entendres in high places, such as Jack Lynch's "I would not like to leave contraception on the long finger too long," or the then-Archbishop of Dublin Dr Kevin McNamara's plea for contraceptive legislation to "be treated as a dead letter." We hoot with laughter at Margaret Thatcher's farewell compliment to Willie Whitelaw, her former NI Secretary, that "every prime minister needs a Willie".
We also delight if the mask slips, and we hear what someone really thinks, as when British politician Reginald Maudling was overheard saying as he left Belfast "For God's sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!"
Some of the most important phrases of the century are not so well remembered however. Few people are aware of the crucial words of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he invited Irish republicans to a conference "to ascertain how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations." This phrase became the foundation of the subsequent Anglo-Irish Treaty, just as the 1990 statement of NI Secretary Peter Brooke that "the British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland" became the corner stone of the peace process (Note that there is no comma after the word "selfish" which would quite change the meaning).
Lloyd George cautioned MPs during a debate on the Treaty, that "you do not settle great complicated problems, the moment you utter a good phrase about them." "Good phrases" have, however, played a unique role in shaping our perceptions of history, and many echoed down through the century. This is especially true of the anti-Home Rule rhetoric used by Edward Carson and others, described by British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, as a "reckless rodomontade" which "furnishes for the future a complete grammar of anarchy".
How often have modern Unionist politicians repeated such catch cries as Carson's "Ulster is not for sale". Republican speechmakers of today also liberally use such emotive quotations as Padraig Pearse's ". . . the fools, the fools, the fools! - they have left us our Fenian dead . . ." or Terence MacSwiney's ". . . it is not they who can inflict most, but they who can suffer most, will conquer." Winston Churchill derided the "frothings" of the anti-Home Rule mob, suggesting that "when the worst comes to the worst, we shall find that civil war evaporates in uncivil words". It was not his only Irish misjudgement. In 1945 we find the UK representative in Dublin, Sir John Maffey, warning Churchill not to take on Eamon de Valera in open debate as "phrases make history here".
Literature also supplied many phrases which endured. When the Bishop of Derry Edward Daly said despairingly in 1993, "The gunmen are not dying for the people, the people are dying for the gunmen," he was quoting almost verbatim from Sean O'Casey's 1923 play, The Shadow of a Gunman. Fine Gael TD John Kelly caused an uproar in August, 1981 for saying the State was "being rent by a farrow of cannibal piglets", but he was merely taking his cue from James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, who said "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow." W.B. Yeats gave many hostages to fortune when he chronicled in verse the emergence of "a terrible beauty", but he also wondered in later life if some words of his might have sent out "certain men the English shot".
He was not the first to regret his use of stirring language. In the very first year of the century John Ingram, author of the ballad Who Fears to Speak of '98, disclaimed any sympathy "with those who preach sedition in our own day".
Politicians sometimes rework the phrases of their enemies to fit the needs of the moment. When the prominent unionist, David Brewster, told colleagues in 1998 that the present Stormont might give unionists "freedom to achieve freedom", he was mimicking Michael Collins's assurance in 1921 that the Treaty gave not "ultimate freedom" but "the freedom to achieve it".
Likewise when John Hume - who has defined political leadership as being about "changing the language of others" - defended meeting Sinn Fein by saying "No stone should be left unturned to advance the cause of peace", he was taking his line from unionist leader James Craig, who justified meeting Michael Collins with the words: "No stone should be left unturned to try to stop the murdering that is going on in Ireland." When unionist leader Brian Faulkner wondered aloud after putting his signature to the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, "which one of us has signed his own death warrant," he was consciously echoing Collins's best remembered quotation after signing the 1921 Treaty, "I may have signed my actual death warrant." (All the Sunningdale signatories stayed alive except Faulkner, who died in a hunting accident).
Two years ago David Trimble called the new Northern Ireland assembly "a pluralist parliament for a pluralist people", in a deliberate reworking of his predecessor James Craig's famous 1934 utterance: "All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State." On another occasion he invoked the unionist election slogans of 1925 to taunt the IRA for refusing to decommission weapons, saying: "There is a certain irony, is there not, in the IRA's constant litany of "Not an inch!" and "What we have we hold!" '
The words "Not" and "No" have dominated the unionist lexicon throughout the century, typically in the "Ulster Says No" campaign against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, and the more recent "No guns, no government". John Hume remarked once, "If you took the word `no' out of the English language, most of them would be speechless". Trimble warned recently "We're perfectly capable, should the need arise, of saying `no'. After all, it's going back to what we know best." Here he was also picking up a controversial phrase by Sinn Fein's Francie Molloy, who threatened that if negotiations failed "we simply go back to what we know best."
A new grammar of anarchy has been written by Sinn Fein, including Gerry Adams's famous remark about the IRA: "They haven't gone away, you know," and Danny Morrison's (often misquoted) comment, "will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand, and an armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?" This was his version of an "Irish solution to an Irish problem", the words used by Charles Haughey to describe his contraceptive legislation in 1979.
If Irish phrases employed to cope with Irish problems cause confusion to outsiders, it is worth remembering the despairing comment of British writers W.C. Stellar and R.J. Yeatman in 1930: "Gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question." But perhaps the best advice for the newcomer to Irish politics is that tendered by Willie Whitelaw. Asked once for his views on Irish history he replied, wisely: "One must be careful not to prejudge the past."
"All the quotations above and some 3,000 more are listed in chronological order in Ireland in Quotes, A History of the 20th Century, by Conor O'Clery, published on Tuesday by O'Brien Press