TG4: the saviour of a language

IN between all the empty debate and petty disputes and rows and static and scandal and point-scoring and personality disputes and constituency infighting, you get rare reminders politics can still concern itself with — to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck — the art of the possible.

In every political generation somebody makes a decision or takes an initiative that has the potential to transform society or change the way we view the world.

Donagh O’Malley did it in 1966 when he declared the era of free education. The similar Butler reforms brought in Britain in 1948 is often said to have been responsible for the emergence of the new breed of highly educated and highly radicalised Catholic politicians and protesters in the late 1960s.