“Ireland has allowed those who claim to speak for Irish America to lead it up the garden path.”

Niall Stanage kindly dropped by our comments zone last week [comment 14], and in today’s Irish Times he expands on what he had to say there about the delusions which encouraged our local media to follow the mis-direction over the US Secretary of State and the political envoy post. From the Irish Times.

The flurry of speculation about Clinton’s possible new title was set off by an unsourced article on an expatriate website. It was then picked up and propagated by large swathes of the Irish media. Their credulity did the public no favours.

The Clinton saga also illuminates larger truths, however: about the sheer wrong-headedness of so many prevalent perceptions of Irish America, and about our national delusions of grandeur regarding where Ireland ranks on the American political agenda.

That expatriate website seems unable to admit what happened. But go read the whole thing. Adds The US administration’s influence here, in particular that of Mitchell Reiss, has been documented before. Although the intended destination may have differed from the actual outcome. Of course, any such thinking is “in the land of the cuckoo..”

Pete Baker