THE OFTEN fraught relationships between civil servants and their Ministers and the “quirky and comic” side of bureaucracy and official language are highlighted in a new anthology publicised by Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan yesterday.
Lord of the Files: Working for the Government, An Anthologyfeatures contributions from President Michael D Higgins, Seamus Heaney, TK Whitaker, Maeve Binchy and Olivia O'Leary. Works by WB Yeats, Myles na gCopaleen and George A Birmingham also appear.
The book, published by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) and edited by Michael Mulreany and Denis O’Brien, collects works of fiction, satire, memoir, journalism and poetry with a common theme: serving the public and working for the Irish government.
Illustrations include reproductions of cartoons from the satirical journal Dublin Opinion, which humorously illustrate frequently used official phrases, such as "The Long Finger" and "The Department Regrets".
Introducing the work in the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street yesterday evening, Mr Deenihan described the collection as “unique”.
Also included are recollections of schooldays by Mr Higgins, who writes of his “extraordinary fortune of having a marvellous holistic primary teacher in a two-teacher school in Newmarket-on-Fergus, a man by the name of William Clune”.
Mr Higgins describes how the schoolmaster knew the names of plants and bushes in Latin, Irish and English.
“There was not one person who came into his schoolyard from any background, with shoes or without, who wasn’t respected as a carrier of wonderment.”
