It’s hard enough to spell ‘Saoirse’ let alone pronounce it. Even as I type it, a red line appears underneath, so even spell-check has concerns. The few drops of Gaelic in my blood composition isn’t enough to enable me to roll it off the tongue. It would be more rogue than brogue. I’m not alone. In fact there’s a YouTube video devoted to correctly pronouncing her name and many an interviewer broaches the subject as a rule rather than the exception. Saoirse herself says it’s pronounced ‘Sersha’ like ‘inertia’, although she said some Irish say ‘Searsha’. Either way it means ‘freedom’. The 21 year-old was born in the Bronx in New York City to Irish parents, but grew up in Ireland’s County Carlow, spending a great deal of it on film sets with her father, so her career path seemed inevitable. She came to prominance as the eccentric 13 year-old aspiring novelist Briony Tallis in Joe Wright’s Atonement in 2007, earning BAFTA, Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
On Sunday she was presenting a screen talk as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival, before attending the premiere of her latest film Brooklyn the next day. A civilised crowd of us lined up to greet her at the back of the BFI on London’s South Bank, discussing how to pronounce her name when she arrives. ‘Ms Ronan’ seemed proper and easier, not that she needed reminding of her name and why we were gathered. But that didn’t stop the more vocal collectors calling out a number of verbal variations. She got the picture and it didn’t really matter how to say or spell it because she doesn’t seem bothered and doesn’t include it as part of her sig anyway.
New Zealand’s 32nd Prime Minister David Lange was one of the best-loved. Becoming his country’s youngest leader of the 20th Century at the age of 41. Heading the fourth Labour Government in 1984, which proved to be one of the most reforming administrations in New Zealand’s history with some of the most radical economic changes anywhere in the industrialised world. But it was his nuclear-free legislation that remains his legacy He was a PM from a small Pacific nation, who could stride on the International stage and take on the ‘big boys’…a real David and Goliath story. This was highlighted in the 1985 televised Oxford Union Debate when he opposed the American TV evangelist, Jerry Falwell, arguing the proposition that ‘nuclear weapons are morally indefensible.’ In his winning speech filled with gems, one quote has lodged in my mind, when he told the Rev.Falwell, “I can smell the uranium on your breath as you lean towards me.” A cutting wit and eloquence,his oratory was based on a need to compensate for his clumsiness at school.When he graduated from Law school David turned down lucritive career paths to repesent the most dispossessed members of his community.
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