Up the Paper Mountain or, How Big Is a Box?

Dr Garret FitzGerald said the other day that it was "normal but not universal" practice for ministers to take papers from their private offices when leaving government.

Dr FitzGerald, himself a former minister and Taoiseach, said he himself had taken away 400 boxes of papers.

That's right: 400 boxes.

Meanwhile Mr Gay Mitchell said he took away "40 small boxes" when he left office last June.

We don't know if Dr FitzGerald's 400 boxes were small, medium, large or extra-large. There is a limit to what even Irish Times journalists can find out within a limited time span. Also, Gay Mitchell's idea of a small box might not correspond to someone else's. The Irish Times studio may yet have to be called in to provide a scale drawing for readers.

Anyway, 400 boxes of any size being definitely a clutter problem, Dr FitzGerald gave the papers to the UCD archives and his permission is required in order to be allowed a gawk at them. As newlyelected NUI Chancellor he will presumably have easy access himself if he plans to write his memoirs. (There is not much else you can do with your memoirs).

This business of taking away papers is interesting. Most people who work in these offices take away a complimentary paper each day. Some people even take a complementary paper, presumably to pre-empt domestic rows in the evenings, or simply to complement the country edition posted daily as a staff perk. (There is little point in living in the city without being able to read reviews of opening-night theatre productions fresh from the press).

Others take away the odd wad of A4 paper or the occasional spiral notepad in order to work on journalistic projects at home. No objection is made to this. Despite technological advances, paper remains our lifeblood. But I have never heard of anyone taking away 40, never mind 400 boxes of paper or papers, even when leaving the office (or high office within the office) permanently. It seems excessive. Fork-lift machinery comes to mind, containers, the move from the Reading Room of the British Museum to St Pancras.

Coincidentally the management here also keeps a "green book", listing all the suspected cryptonationalists on the staff, a blue book listing unacceptable words and phrases, a black book for obvious reasons, a red book listing the three remaining socialists and a beautifully-bound pink book for - well, you get the picture, and very colourful it is too. All these volumes are kept under conditions of high security, or were the last time I checked the shelf.

RIGHT. I see that the EU has approved nearly £1.5 million for a pilot project to introduce primary schoolchildren to modern languages. The aim is "to foster positive attitudes to language learning at an early age", according to the Education Minister.

Not too early, I hope. There was a report in the London Times recently about a Scottish stroke victim who regained consciousness to find she had acquired a South African accent. Apparently this condition is known to medical people as "Foreign Accent Syndrome." Occurring as a result of a stroke or an accident, it is relatively rare - there are only 12 reported cases this century.

BACK in the 1960s, a professor of neurology in a Jerusalem hospital found that on recovery from a serious stroke, polyglot patients fluent in several languages tended to revert to their mother tongue. Apparently this had some distressing consequences: one intellectual Swiss gentleman, whose daily language was High German, found himself speaking in coarse Low German after his stroke.

As our young people are introduced to new modern languages their levels of sophistication will rise accordingly. But those of them unfortunate enough to suffer accidents, or strokes in later years, run the risk (slight though it is) of reverting to their native tongue, embellished with regional accent (Dublin or Cork or Mayo or whatever), and embarrassing themselves, their families and friends. The more languages they have from an early age, the more linguistic confusion and distress are likely.

On the plus side, one victim of the syndrome some years ago was a 46-year-old American who walked away from a car crash with a French accent though he had never been farther from his Massachusetts home than New Jersey. If such injury effects could be recreated in the language laboratory without pain or distress, much valuable time might be saved in the classroom.