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Donald Trump’s favourite Irish proverb is actually a Nigerian poem
Posted On Mar 18 2017
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Speaking in NY he said he can’t leave until a new government has been appointed in Northern Ireland.
The U.S. Capitol’s St. Patrick’s Day rituals did not bring Donald Trump any luck this year.
“We asked not what America could do for us but what we could do for America and we still do”. And we still do.
It soon became apparent that the phrase wasn’t an Irish proverb at all, but was in fact a line from a poem by Nigerian poet Albashir Adam Alhassan.
As someone whose ancestry is so Irish that my 23 and Me results were a shamrock, St. Patrick’s Day has always meant a lot to me. But The Irish Times editorialized in favor of attending, saying, “no matter how gratifying to our sense of moral superiority, a boycott will be seen as a lost opportunity for face time with the world’s most important leader”. After reporting on aides desperately shutting down questions about Kenny having earlier called Trump’s policies “racist”, reporters helpfully added, “Disappointingly, Trump didn’t look as orange as we expected”.
During the USA presidential campaign, Kenny criticized Trump for his “racist and dangerous” language.
Irish social media users also weighed in, with some – including Twitter’s former Ireland director Mark Little – highly skeptical that a quote they’d never heard of was indeed an old proverb from the Emerald Isle.
Correction, March 17, 2017, 3:01 p.m. ET: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Enda Kenny.
“The Taoiseach’s remarks were on the button”, he said. “We will compete for mobile business from the United Kingdom that sees the value of and need for locating in the European Union”.
We are indeed going to have a remembrance on St Patrick’s Day.
Businessman and former NY mayor Michael Bloomberg praised Mr Kenny for urging Donald Trump to help the US’s undocumented immigrants.
You can’t blame him now, can you?
“This is a country that has benefited from immigrants. So true, played a very, very big role”. I didn’t want to believe what she said initially, .
