Don't we get a lot of value from Eamon de Buitlear! His wild life films, his publications, his music, his wonderful stories about his earlier experience in a fishing tackle shop which he has unleashed on occasions on radio and TV. He is a story teller, one of the best. And now he is current President of the Oireachtas, an account of which is to be read in the February number of An Cosantoir, the Defence Forces Magazine. First to Eamon, whose father, also Eamon, was a considerable figure in our Army. Once OC of the Cead Cath, the Irish speaking Battalion based in Galway. Eamon senior was, for a time ADC to our first President, Douglas Hyde, who chose him for his good Irish. Eamon senior was also fluent in French and German and worked in G2, the intelligence unit, for some years.
But his first love was for Irish. "In fact," Eamon junior, as we may call him, said "in all of the fifty years during which we enjoyed a long friendship until his death in 1981, he didn't utter one single word to me in English ever." It was the father, too, who thought up the title "Amuigh Faoin Speir" for that famous series of TV programmes by Eamon junior.
And the President and his ADC were also to be seen together pike fishing and dryfly fishing in Roscommon. So it says here. What about the snipe shooting, which the story tellers in McKee barracks used to embellish with wondrous feats of lepping from tussock to tussock by old Duggie (or his Excellency), while his followers languished behind the almost octogenerain. Anything for a good story.
But there is much more in the Cosantoir article, "Irish Culture and the Defence Forces", by Commandant Noel O'Grady. He has good stories to tell and closes with this: "Our UN world wide experiences and our continuing immersion in the EU, with its attendant implications, make us conscious of our native tongue and have heightened for many of us a desire to retain our sense of Irishness." And the Government policy of fostering bilingualism in the forces is an attainable one.