There is a particular horror to watching a politician confront the emptiness of her own rhetoric, and the clip of Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan in the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee achieves something almost sublime in its brevity. Boylan begins with the familiar lament: it is “unfortunate” that “we can’t use our own language.” The words hang for a moment, freighted with the entire weight of Irish history, the long struggle for cultural survival, the spectral presence of a tongue half-buried by empire and attempted revival alike. Then comes the correction, polite and devastating: of course you can. Irish interpretation is available. Boylan’s mask slips. “We didn’t know, sorry… I wasn’t prepared,” as if preparation for one’s own language were some onerous academic chore rather than the minimal duty of anyone claiming to speak for a nation in Irish. The performance ended not with tragedy but with the small, bathetic thud of an unprepared speaker caught in the act of pretending to care.
