THE "Irish bull", for which our nation was, perhaps unjustly, famous, reached its high point in the flamboyant utterings of Sir Boyle Roche, staunch Unionist who sat in Grattan's Parliament in College Green. "Mr Speaker," he declared on one occasion, "I small a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky, but I shall seek him out and nip him in the bud."
But some more recent and highly respected politicians could mix a metaphor or two with just as much elan, sangfroid and savoir faire: James Dillon, for example, speaking to the Second Stage of the Central Bank Bill in the Dail in March, 1942, told James Hickey, Labour TD for Cork City: "It is exasperating to see the solution of all human ills continually evading you like the Fata Morgana dancing across the bog."
The Fata Morgana, of course, has never danced across a bog. Named after Morgan le Fay, the fairy like sister of King Arthur of the Round Table, the Fata is a mirage sometimes seen in southern Europe, particularly in the Straits of Messina that separate Sicily from the Italian mainland. It occurs when an unusual thermal structure in the atmosphere causes images of boats and buildings in the far distance to appear in the sky and to be elongated in such a way that they seem like towers of great vertical extent. The Fata Morgana can transform a distant nondescript horizon into an entrancing scene from fairyland, and is said to induce in those who see it a deep sense of endless longing, tinged with blissful happiness. Perhaps this was what Deputy Dillon had in mind as he contemplated the establishment of our Central Bank?
When it comes to dancing across the bog, however, he is more likely to have been thinking of the will-'o-the-wisp, the ignis fatuus often seen long ago, over marshy ground on mild, wet, autumn nights. It is a tiny brightly coloured flame a few inches high, caused by the spontaneous combustion of gases leaking from the ground, and which appears to move from place to place like a lantern carried by someone moving in a zig zag line.
The will-'o-the-wisp in folklore has a macabre reputation. Solitary travellers were lured to death as they followed the moving light across a treacherous marsh; it was said of it that "it leadeth men up and downe in a circle of absurditie, so they never knowe where they be" which I suppose is consistent enough with the tone of Deputy Dillon's speech.