World of Politics with Harry McGee

The first Minister I ever recall meeting was Tom O’Donnell, a Limerick TD, who was Minister for the Gaeltacht. He came into our classroom in the Jes when we were very young, spoke a few sentences to us in Irish, and then departed. But not without getting the teacher to let us off homework. Maybe that’s why I remember him.

The thing about O’Donnell that I learned only years afterwards was that he was deaf, so it was a good achievement for him, a non-Gaeltacht man to boot, to have learned Irish to such an extent.

How many hundreds of ministers have there been in Ireland since the........

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