FROM THE ARCHIVES:Spare a thought for ministerial speechwriters who produce scripts for banal events to which their bosses are invited. Ministers frequently discard the prepared scripts, but they are still distributed to the media as the record of what they are about to say. Nell McCafferty had some fun, in this piece from 1977, with a couple of scripts prepared for the minister for finance, Richie Ryan, and Ireland's EEC commissioner, Dick Burke, adding in, as it were, her own reaction shots to the words that might or might not have been spoken.
MR RICHIE Ryan, minister for finance, announced in Donegal yesterday that “the potato came to Europe in 1588”. Mr Richard Burke told a university meeting in Galway that he was, as they knew, a member of the European Commission with responsibility for Transport, Taxation, Consumer Affairs and the European Parliament.
Mr Ryan had travelled specially from Dublin to Donegal to make his speech, a text of which he released to the press. Mr Burke had travelled specially from Brussels to Galway to make his, and placed an embargo on the release of the text until 8.30pm.
Mr Ryan thought that it was “always a treat to come to Donegal”. He thanked Donegal Potatoes Limited for their invitation to “come here today to formally open the store”, referring to their new potato storage and grading unit in Newtowncunningham.
Mr Burke was even more fulsome. He told the Galway University Symposium on the West of Ireland and the European Community that the occasion offered him relative tranquillity after a “72-hour” stint of work on his portfolios . . .
Mr Ryan was in less abstract mood. The text of the speech was laid out in subheadings, moving factually from the history of the potato and the seed potato industry, to the financial benefits of a potato co-operative project, especially when helped by grant assistance, EEC aid and county development teams.
He tempered his sorrow that Ireland had a “long, but not always a happy, tradition of potato production”, with confidence in production as “fully reflected in my decision to allocate from the Special Regional Development Fund, towards the cost the biggest single grant ever approved from the fund”.
The minister waxed lyrical about the ability of the people of that county to produce and sell “in a very competitive market”, especially now that they had established a project that would allow “the fullest advantage to be taken of the best of modern expertise and techniques” in the field of potatoes.
There would be even higher standards of quality . . . he was practically yelling, and what with the “lowered cost of marketing”, the store, using an “orderly approach to marketing on the most lucrative export markets should yield, improved working conditions and significantly better returns for growers”.
There was even more in store, he continued. The minister for agriculture had spoken recently about proposed EEC provisions on plant health. “The high status of Ireland’s plant health is recognised internationally,” Mr Ryan beamed, and, he shone, “of course Donegal stands high in this respect”. He was not just speaking as a bog Irishman. The EEC authorities were prepared to support the store also, by way of a grant, he announced.
Mr Ryan concluded cautiously, realising that the nation would be informed of his speech, applicants for his grants would have to present a worthwhile self-sustaining project. “I hope nobody will think I am being blasphemous or conceited when I hint that the State, like God, helps those who help themselves.”
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