Rónán’s ‘sprinkler’ sparks awkward silence

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Rónán Mullen, the Galway-born senator, was recently in touch over the phone regarding something or other.

Mid-sentence, he apologised and asked us to bear with him for 30 seconds or so as he was just in the middle of some “irrigation”.

Yes, you read that right.

Far be it for us to judge but it did conjure up an awful image of the Independent senator relieving himself out the back at the farm near his Ahascragh home. It gave us a good chuckle.

And it prompted the following text message from Mullen, in the interest of clarity, and to spare blushes.

“I thought I heard you laugh when I said I was doing some irrigation. For the record, I was moving a lawn sprinkler out the back!”

A case of the senator doth protest too much?

Something smells fishy about new Gaeltacht minister without Irish!

In last week’s Bytes, we ranted about the Father Ted-style appointment of a non-Irish-speaking Minister with responsibility for Irish-speaking areas.

It’s taken us a week but we think we could possibly be able to shed some more light on that baffling, ludicrous decision by Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

We’ve a conspiracy theory but one not without credence . . . politics is a murky business . . . something smells fishy about it.

In order to understand why the non-Gaeilge-speaking Donegal Deputy Joe McHugh was appointed Gaeltacht Minister, let us rewind to April, 2012 when he was just a humble TD.

Joe ‘gan stró’, as we call him, had a ‘right go’ at one of his Gaeltacht Minister predecessors, Éamon Ó Cuív, the Galway West TD.

Dev Óg, a fluent Irish speaker, was at a Dáil Committee debate on the proposed controversial Salmon farm in Galway Bay.

The Fianna Fáil TD said Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, was one of the most robust Irish speaking communities in the country.

The fish farm – and the influx of people it would bring to the area – might upset the linguistic balance of the community.

He called for a “linguistic study of the possible impacts of the proposed development”, in the context of protecting the language.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.