teeth will be provided

Ireland is about to hold elections and campaign posters tied to telephone poles were an ubiquitous addition to a West Cork landscape that usually consists of stone walls, bramble, grass, herds of sheep and cows, wire fences, the occasional tree deformed by costal winds, wildflowers, and (in the recent boom years of the “Celtic Tiger”) construction sites. Without exception, candidates represented themselves with frontal photographs taken against a neutral background, which amounted to little more than what you would expect to find in their passports. Splashed across the posters were their names and their party – and, if they were in the Fianna Fáil party of the current prime minister, Bertie Ahern, you could also read the chummy appellation “Bertie’s Team.” Posters sporting the portrait of Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, were in abundance, though I do not think he was running for a particular office this election. Smiling through his greying beard and oversized wire-rim glasses, Adams now looks more like a hippie-cum-math teacher from Portland than an alleged IRA terrorist.

I asked T. what Adams’ role in politics in the Republic currently was and we got to talking about his past appearances in the press. I remarked that I remembered seeing him on the American news on the occasion of the Good Friday Agreement, and he asked, “Did you hear his voice?” Legend has it that for years Adams never slept two consecutive nights in the same place, and under the Thatcher regime the ethical conundrum for the Irish press as to how to report his statements came to the fore: on the one hand, he is an incendiary figure of utmost newsworthiness, and on the other, there was no small concern about “giving a voice to a terrorist.” For a long time, whenever Adams was interviewed on television, he would be seated in darkness so that all viewers could see was his silhouette. This is common practice when the aim is to guard a speakers’ identity, yet in Adams’ case, I imagine the effect is quite the opposite – emphasizing his notoriety and rendering him more conspicuous. Yet what I find still more unusual is the fact that his words were also always spoken verbatim by someone else rather than altered by a computer. T. thought he recalled an instance when a woman spoke in his stead, and when no effort was made to change pronouns of first-person address, the “whole thing was just very eerie.”

As it happened we were on our way to Cork for the day on May 8, the first day of the regional government in Northern Ireland – and this nine years after the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin’s Chief Negotiator, Martin McGuinness, and Protestant preacher, Ian Paisley, are to lead the new government. T. reminded me who Paisley was by referring to a video we had seen of the stand-up of Irish comedian Dave Allen. Allen has a routine in which he mimics Paisley’s fire-and-brimstone approach: “‘...there will be a wailing and a great gnashing of teeth!’ And a little old lady in the front row says, ‘But I don’t have any teeth!’ And Paisley says, ‘Teeth will be provided!’”