'I started tweeting a daily Yeats quote': Culture picks from Dan Mulhall, Ireland's ambassador to the US
US president Joe Biden and Ireland's ambassador to the US, Dan Mulhall.
Dan Mulhall, 65, is Ireland’s ambassador to the US. He was born in Waterford and attended UCC before taking up diplomatic postings in New Delhi, Brussels, Vienna and Edinburgh. He has also served as Ireland’s Ambassador to Malaysia, Germany and Britain.
When I was growing up, I loved books like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, the Hardy Boys mysteries. There was a little private library in Waterford run by an elderly lady where you joined and paid a few pence to take a book out for a week. I was a regular there. I wasn’t reading deeply profound works of literature, I read popular novels for young people at that time.
I was born on the cusp of the pop revolution — The Beatles were my heroes. One day at school, a friend of mine who had an older brother gave me a copy of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. I remember avoiding my school friend for weeks to try and avoid giving it back. I would come home from school every afternoon and sit there for two and three hours and play it again and again. In my era, there was very little popular music on radio — there was only one radio station, RTÉ 1, and at that time they would have maybe one or two hours of pop music a week.
Luckily, we had Radio Caroline, I listened to that on a little pocket radio with earphones at night in bed when I should have been sleeping. We were all obsessed with music but we didn’t have money to be buying records. We were constantly swapping records with each other so we could spread our wings a bit and learn more about different bands.
When I got to university in Cork, I met people from all over Munster and it was a great time. It was five years after free education came in at secondary school level, so the numbers going to university suddenly shot up. Most people I met in Cork those days would have been people who came from families like mine, and would have been the first from their family to go to university.
There was a certain kind of intellectual excitement there. We were lucky that in Cork at the time, you had John Montague, who was a renowned poet, and the professor of English, Sean Lucy, was also a poet and a critic. Éamonn Ó Carragáin taught old and middle English. He founded a medieval choir when I was there, I joined for a while. It was good fun and we all enjoyed it immensely.
Seán Dunne [poet and former Irish Examiner journalist who died in 1995] was a year behind me in Mount Sion school in Waterford. We had a little poetry circle in school, which was organised by our enlightened teacher Seán Crowe. We were also together in Cork, he came to UCC a year after me. We were fairly close and when I left Cork and went to Dublin, he would come and stay with us. When I decided to get married in New Delhi, Seán sent us a poem [Wedding Letter to New Delhi] as a wedding present; I still have the original manuscript. It’s a fine poem, he published it in several collections so obviously he was proud of it. Then of course, I had the sad experience of attending Seán’s funeral down in Coolea, at St Gobnait’s Cemetery in Ballyvourney.
Over the years we would have family gatherings, and to this day, it usually ends up in a singsong. Everyone in the family had a party piece at least. Mine was An Poc ar Buile, I think I have sung it on four continents. It is a song, that even if people don’t understand Irish, the sound of it is quite appealing.
I remember once I was at a big conference in Malaysia. One of the organisers asked me if I could sing and I said I could sing a song. She said there was going to be karaoke later and I thought it would be a small room with a few people. Then, in the middle of this big dinner in Kuala Lumpur, she said ‘now we have a special treat, one of our esteemed guests, the ambassador from Ireland will sing a song’. I managed to do it but it was a shock to me. One of those moments in my career I will never forget.
I am the honorary president of the Yeats Society. I have always had a fascination with Yeats’ work, I see him as a national treasure, our Shakespeare, and also as a great witness to Irish history at a time of immense change and transformation. Yeats has had a lifelong impact on me.
I remember in India back in the 1980s meeting the sister [Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit] of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She recited two Yeats poem by heart. She had learned Yeats’ poetry while she had been interned by the British in the 1930s and had never forgotten it. I thought if the most powerful Indian family of the 20th century is bewitched by our poetry, we should also take an interest in it. That was one experience that left me with a profound sense of how important our literature is. I have taken that lesson with me around the world over the last 40 years.
About five years ago, for the 150th anniversary of Yeats’ birth, I started tweeting a daily Yeats quote. When the year came to an end, I decided to keep it going. I continued with it, sharing the work of other Irish poets. I have tweeted everything from English translations of early Irish poetry from a thousand years ago to contemporary poets. People have responded very enthusiastically. At the start of the pandemic, because people needed comfort and consolation, I started tweeting my readings of Irish poetry on a daily basis.
I did that for about three months, for the first stage of lockdown. Now I do it once or twice a week. I get an amazingly positive response, never a negative one. I presume it’s because the people who follow me like what I do, they are the more reasonable or gentle type of people who are on Twitter. They don’t suffer from the troll tendencies in other corners of the Twittersphere.
As we all know, President Biden is a great fan of Irish poetry. He said ‘people think I quote Irish poets because I’m Irish. I don’t do it for that reason, I do it because they are the best’. It was no surprise to discover that he was going to have someone reading poetry at his inauguration, and he made a brilliant choice in Amanda Gorman. He could have chosen an older, more established, more celebrated poet but he chose this very talented young woman.
It was the combination of the power of the words and the presence she has, and the performance that she put on that really made people sit up and take notice. It was remarkable how everyone said she captured the moment better than anyone else. That demonstrates the power of poetry when it is done well. The event itself was very powerful, and to see someone who is so proud of his Irish heritage be inaugurated as the American president was something quite special.
- Taoiseach Micheál Martin will join Dan Mulhall on St Patrick’s Day for Shades of Green, a celebration of Ireland and America’s most talented artists. Find out more and register here.
