With fuel prices rising, the Atlantic alliance creaking and two wars now raging on its periphery, it’s a difficult time to be the European Union. Ireland, set to take on the presidency of the council of the EU from July, faces an uphill battle to get things on track. But it may have found a secret weapon: approximately 4,500 woollen scarves.
Thanks to contract fairness rules, an apparent plan by the Department of Foreign Affairs to wow diplomats with gifts of “a distinctive and uniquely Irish artistic character” has hit the Government’s procurement website. Could you be the knitter to provide the likes of Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban with insulation next winter when the whipping winds may coincide with record-high liquefied natural gas costs?
You’ll need to make it out of wool, though not necessarily Irish wool as long as you provide information on where the wool is from. They must be deterioration-proof for at least a year, by which time the officials will be long gone. And they must be must be “manufactured in a shade of green associated with Irish heritage eg moss, emerald, heather, forest”.
The most important thing is speed: tenders should be sent to something described as “the electronic tenderbox” (seriously) by April 8th, and the first scarves should start hitting diplomatic goody-bags by June 5th.
“The successful tenderer shall ensure that all scarves supplied under this contract are produced in a consistent and uniform shade of green, with no visible variation in colour between batches or units,” the document goes on. Not forty shades of green on this occasions – one shade.
New territory
Fresh from a decade of political confusion about whether it should be hard or soft or relocated to the Irish Sea, the border deserves some diversion. It could come in the form of a scheme to have the entire “borderlands” declared a Unesco “region of literature”, as revealed last weekend in The Guardian.
Are the borderlands a region of literature? Sure, why not, is Overheard’s position. The Sligo of Yeats is near-ish Fermanagh, the Armagh of Muldoon is near-ish Monaghan and the Monaghan of Kavanagh is, in turn, near-ish Armagh.
The plan’s proposers, Arts Over Borders, are adopting quite an expansive view of what constitutes both a border area and a relevant writer. Seamus Heaney’s homeplace is half as far from the Glens of Antrim as it is from Donegal, but he’s mentioned. And so (again, why not) are the likes of Oscar Wilde (Dublin’s Westland Row), Jonathan Swift (Dublin’s Hoey’s Court), and Samuel Beckett (Dublin’s Foxrock), all of whom went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen. Could it have been there that they developed their biting wit?
No matter the liberties taken, it could prove a clever way to invite the coveted American dollar to less-loved corners of the island. While rugby and GAA cling to the traditional provinces, the real map of Ireland now shows the “Wild Atlantic Way” up the west, “Ireland’s Ancient East” in the east, “Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands” down the middle and “Dublin” in Dublin. The “Northern Literary Lands”, as its proponents call the new branding effort, would fit right in.
Wurst behaviour
It’s goodbye to vegan veal after the European Union landed on a compromise plan for banning nefarious plant-eaters from referring to their products by meat names.
The long-running effort has been the subject of much lobbying, and some slightly surreal political commentary implying a constant risk of accidentally eating pork escalopes made of insect protein. Much of the early debate focused on veggie burgers and sausages – both relatively popular substitutes – but the provisional agreement in fact exempted them.
Instead, new rules will rule out the use of more general – or even physical – terms ranging from beef, pork, goose and goat to cuts and parts such as shank, rump, wing and liver.
Are European consumers eating a lot of vegan liver? Data is scant, though there are some recipes online for “mock” chopped liver, a traditional Jewish festive dish – it’s often made of walnuts.
The French, who traditionally take their steaks closer to the state of nature than even committed Irish carnivores tolerate, have been particularly in favour of action. “We refuse to let plant proteins appropriate meat names for marketing purposes,” said Jean-François Guihard, meat industry leader, as though the peas themselves were launching the products.
“Eine Wurst ist eine Wurst. Wurst ist nicht vegan,” added German chancellor Friedrich Merz, in a contribution that probably does not need to be translated. The Germans eat 19kg of sausage per person per year, among the most in the world.
They can keep it up, as long as they stay alert to the ingredients list. Some of the Eurocrats suggested that consumers could be trusted to know the difference. After all, “a beef tomato doesn’t contain any beef,” as Austrian MEP Anna Stürgkh pointed out during earlier debate. “Ladies’ fingers are not made of actual ladies’ fingers.”
Só what?
“Soe that the speach being Irish, the hart must needes be Irishe,” Edmund Spenser, the poet and colonial administrator, once wrote, “for out of the aboundance of the hart, the tonge speaketh.”
Overheard has this week been trying to figure out what this means for Kildare Village, which has been tempting shoppers down the M7 with its “Só Irish” ad campaign.
“Discover a shopping experience that’s Só Irish at Kildare Village,” says the ad copy of the boutique out-of-town shopping destination owned by British-based Value Retail plc, which itself is part-owned by US private equity fund L Catterton, in which French global luxury conglomerate LVMH is a major investor.
Só welcoming, it goes on. Só memorable. Só stylish. Só what’s the story with the fada, you’re probably wondering. It turns out that the word is not the English so, as in “that’s so ridiculous”, but the Irish word só, meaning comfort, ease, satisfaction and enjoyment of food, prosperity and, in this particular case, luxury. Or at least it “draws inspiration” from the Irish word só, as Victor Biffi Rosano, Kildare Village’s business director, told industry publication Adworld.
The quasi-bilingual campaign has ironically disrupted the suaimhneas and só of gaeilgeoirs. But the stylistic diacritic – the practice of adding a symbol to a letter primarily because it looks cool and supports the brand image you want to convey – has a long and successful history. Neither Motörhead nor Mötley Crüe worried too much about confusing the Germans.