There is a certain kind of Irish political embarrassment that feels less like a news story and more like a recurring dream. You’re back in school, you haven’t studied for the test, the teacher is speaking a language you don’t understand, and somehow you’ve also been elected to Dáil Eireann.
Enter Cathy Bennett, Sinn Féin TD for the Cavan–Monaghan constituency, and her headlong collision with how the European Union works.
It starts, as these things often do, with an innocent question that reveals a chasm. At an Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, Bennett wants to know about the “president of Europe.” Not as an off‑hand phrase, but as a concrete office, a throne that must be filled, a vacancy to which, presumably, the Irish state must send forth a champion. How much, she asks, is the Government spending to “find a candidate” for this post? One imagines a kind of pan‑continental X‑Factor: Leo Varadkar in a sequinned blazer, Ursula von der Leyen juggling dwarfs, a judging panel of scowling technocrats deducting points from Gerry Adams for insufficient fiscal discipline and the like.
The problem is that this person does not exist. There is no president of Europe. There are presidents everywhere, of course – Commission, Council, Parliament – proliferating like mould in the Brussels humidity, but no single crowned head of the continent. The EU, in its infinite genius, has constructed a system that is both impenetrably complex and utterly devoid of the monarchical glamour of the U.S. or French presidencies. The top jobs are traded in back rooms between governments and party families; no one is out there auditioning for the role of Emperor of Schengen.
So when Bennett insists on knowing who Ireland is “backing” for the presidency of this imaginary Europe, the scene takes on a strange, almost theological air. Officials shuffle their papers, trying to reconcile reality with the question. How do you tell a sitting TD that the office that she thought she was interrogating the unfortunate Minister about doesn't exist? Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Neale Richmond, let the hapless TD down very gently, in the same manner a vet would deliver bad news to the owner of a terminally ill puppy.
