MARY COUGHLAN’S BOSTON ADDRESS

Posted on | September 28, 2010 | 62 Comments

My fellow Americuns,

it is with great pleasure that I am here today on this very important top secret mission from Ireland. A funny thing happened on the way here, actually. An opposition politician tried to stop me from making this visit but in the end another politician gave him a pear so it’s all fine.

What can I say about education in Ireland? Well, we have many wonderful universities such as UCD, DCU, UCC, ICU and MFI. That’s not even mentioning that cornerflag of Irish schooling, Trinity College, named after the holy trinity of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. When you consider some of the students that have walked through those mallowed halls it is truly inspiral, like a carpet. Oscar Wilde, Brad Stoker, that bloke who took a year off RTE to make a website nobody reads, McNulty from The Wire and Samuel Beckett are all former aluminiumni. Imagine the pride of following in their footsteps.

Ireland is a nati0n which loves students, both its own natives and natives from other countries. I’m sure there are many native Americuns who would find great joy in studying in our country. Not only is there’s a special dedication to learning but the extra-crickular activities are what makes being a student so great.

When a student sends an email or a telex home to give their parents an upgrade on what’s been happening in their lives, they can regale them with tails of poetry, science, arts and medicine as well as hilarious stories about how they ended up in an early house in Smithfield one morning doing Jaegerbums with the salt and pepper of the earth. The real Dubliners and not those fakers who have that magazine Tiger Woods pseud.

We are a country of scribes and poets, writers and playwriters, actors and musicians. Our literarally tradition is known throughout the world and beyond. You need only look at the great works of Irish literature to see how potential students might be influenced. Who could fail to be awoken by James Joyce and Ulysses? There is nothing more quimitentially Irish than the story of how Ulysses, commander of the giant spaceship, Odyssey, kills the giant Cyclops to save a group of enslaved children and is sentenced to find the kingdom of Hades by Zoos.

Who would not laugh out loud, or ROFL as the kids say these days, at Flann O’Brien’s hilarious cop novel? Let them witness the majesty of an O’Casey play performed at The Abbey at a time when the country is most definitely in a state of chassis. And if they do not experience the joy of seeing out of work Gaiety School of Acting graduates scratch a few pennies together performing a half-baked Shakespeare play in St Stephen’s Green then their time here will have been ill-spent.

In conclusion we hold education to the highest possible standards. From Einstein to Darwin, from Tyrannosaurus’s theorum to regular calculus, it’s all there. We don’t believe in the ‘three Rs’. Reading, Writing and Arthrithmitic are not 3 Rs, they’re an R, a W and an A. We have the RAW materials to educate your children for WAR. And no Americun can live without that.

I think you kindly for your time and your attention. A 64 page bruschetta is available at the front