The Great Debate

When I was in primary school, we put on an international themed nativity play. I imagine it arose from the teacher wondering how she would give parts to the sea of faces in front of her. I was the little Dutch girl who came to lay my gift at the foot of the manger. If memory serves me, the whole of the EEC, as it was known then, were equally keen to shower the new born king with gifts. At the time my father had a house rented to a family from The Netherlands. The Van Genneps not only tutored me in the correct pronunciation of ‘Welkom klein kindje Jezus’, but also lent me a pair of clogs, a traditional outfit complete with headdress and a bouquet of plastic tulips to offer the infant. I loved my role and was fascinated at the notion that I could learn lines by rote in a language I didn’t speak. That was to be a mere dry run for the kind of charlatan behaviour I would dabble with in secondary school.

Around 3^rd year I discovered that there was a thing called debating. For some this was an opportunity to engage in heated discourse over strongly held views. For me it was an opportunity to stand up and be noticed, something I got little opportunity to do at home, and so decided to cast my nets wider in the hope of snaring an audience. I signed up and the following week got my first debate motion. I wish I could go back to the innocence I had before I entered the concert hall for that first debate. I had no idea how prepared people would be, how practiced and polished and passionate they would be. I can’t remember what the motion was, all I can recall is a sense of having been exposed as a dunderhead. Wordless when my few lame points had been taken by the first speaker, clueless on the wider discourse of the topic, hopelessly lost amongst a brand of student I didn’t normally mix with.

Perhaps we won, perhaps we lost, but somehow, there was another round and I was on the team. The motion, I remember concerned trade unionism, and I on the proposing side was to sing their merit. It was time to call in the big guns. The Brother and I spent most of our teenage years trying to avoid one another, but these were desperate times that called for ever more atrocious measures. History, English and the ability to blind people with big words were, and still are, just some of his strong suits. I asked him for help, thinking he might give me a few pointers, he only went and wrote a whole speech for me. I was dizzy reading those big words. I even learnt the whole of W.B. Yeats ‘September 13’ poem to throw at them despite it being on the leaving cert course and unthinkable that somebody in the lower years could know it. A smug inner glow ran through me as I knew that with The Brother’s rhetoric, my high-faluting quotes and an air of confidence that wasn’t just down to my liberal application of Impulse Merely Musk, I was flying high.

I delivered my speech flawlessly. I thumped the desk at the places The Brother had tutored me to, and I championed Big Jim Larkin as if he were a relative. This performance of stagecraft all came asunder when the speeches finished and it was open to the floor for questions. Slick kids put rebuttals directly to me and without The Brother there to prompt me I was as badly undone as I had been on my first debate, worse, because I had further to fall.

My future as a public speaker came to a close around then, I settled for reading at Mass. However, The Brother in his role as advisor and speech writer, is still very much active. He is now his niece’s first port of call when she is facing into the foray of debating. There is one this week on the motion of condemning political protest outside government buildings, she has been assigned the proposition, meaning, she has to put forth an argument why they are not a good idea. We shot off a message to The Uncle, waiting for his magic reply.

Still a socialist to his fingernails, The Brother, who 35 years ago wrote passionately in support of the work of trade unions, felt unable to now turn his coat sufficiently to condemn the right to political protest. It’s just a debate we pleaded, look at it from the other point of view. ‘Never’ came his final text.

The debate speech is now written, even though most of my suggested points were discarded. She is a different animal to me, in that she is prepared to do the hard work herself. My suggestion that she lash on a good deal of body spray for its confidence boosting properties fell flat when she reminded me, ‘It’s on Zoom Mum’.

As my old pal W.B. once said, ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave’.