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Seanad Éireann · 2020-11-10

Gnó an tSeanaid - Business of Seanad

FG Regina Doherty · Nominated by the Taoiseach

Party shown is the one held on 2020-11-10, frozen at parse time — not the speaker's party today.

Summary of this debate

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Now that we have President-elect Biden, the Ceann Comhairle and I wrote to the Taoiseach asking that consideration be given to inviting President-elect Biden to come to Ireland and to address a joint sitting of these Houses. I know the Mayo and Louth contingents, and now I hear the Wexford and Cork contingents, where he has relatives would welcome such an address. In our letter to President-elect Biden, we quoted one of his favourite poets, W.B.

Yeats, who is a former Member of the Seanad: Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends. I am sure Ireland has a friend in President-elect Biden and that he looks forward to meeting all his friends in Ireland when he comes here in due course. I pay tribute to RTÉ for the coverage it gave us over the weekend, in particular the montage at the very end that was so poignantly put to the Seamus Heaney poem.

Built by scoring every sentence in the debate on how distinctive its language is, then quoting the highest-scoring ones back word for word and in the order spoken. Nothing is paraphrased or invented — if a sentence appears here, it was said in the chamber. Drawn from 229 words across 2 contributions by 2 speakers.

Most used terms in this debate

How often each word appears across the whole debate, ranked by how distinctive it is to this debate rather than common to all parliamentary language.

president-elect 4
biden 4
contingents 2
glory 2
montage 1
poignantly 1
heaney 1
poets 1
poem 1
yeats 1
viral 1
friends 2

The full debate

All 2 contributions, start to finish, in the order they were made. The one you came here for is highlighted.

CC Mark Daly

Many Senators spoke last week on the issue of the US presidential election. Now that we have President-elect Biden, the Ceann Comhairle and I wrote to the Taoiseach asking that consideration be given to inviting President-elect Biden to come to Ireland and to address a joint sitting of these Houses. I know the Mayo and Louth contingents, and now I hear the Wexford and Cork contingents, where he has relatives would welcome such an address.

In our letter to President-elect Biden, we quoted one of his favourite poets, W.B. Yeats, who is a former Member of the Seanad:

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.

I am sure Ireland has a friend in President-elect Biden and that he looks forward to meeting all his friends in Ireland when he comes here in due course.

FG Regina Doherty this contribution

I speak on behalf of the female contingent in saying that we are very much looking forward to receiving the first lady Vice President to address both Houses of the Oireachtas. I pay tribute to RTÉ for the coverage it gave us over the weekend, in particular the montage at the very end that was so poignantly put to the Seamus Heaney poem. I thought it was beautiful and, apparently, it has gone viral in America so it has not done us any harm whatsoever.