Nobody was ever under any illusions that Enda Kenny’s trip to Washington for Paddy’s Day would surely throw up a few head-scratching moments.
Donald Trump dutifully provided a particularly confusing moment during his remarks, when he shared one of his favourite Irish proverbs (that actually turned out to be a poem by a Nigerian Muslim man who has since gone into banking): it went “Always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue. But never forget to remember those that have stuck by you.”
Of course, this proverb was familiar to exactly nobody in Ireland, and people were quick to take to Twitter and alert the world to the fact that, as a country, none of us have ever heard that saying before.
Late-night talk show host and Irish descendant Stephen Colbert went one better and took the matter onto his TV show on St. Patrick’s Day.
In Colbert’s opening monologue, he pointed out that the author of the “proverb” is a man named Albashir Alhassan, and remarked that he was “surprised Trump even allowed that poem into the country.”
Colbert then whipped out “Donald Trump’s Book of Bigly Irish Sayings,” and shared some touching and inspiring quotes from WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw — both as Irish as the proverb that Trump shared during the week.
