LLANGEFNI

Former Anglesea Shire Hall

INTERREG

I once chaired an afternoon session at a conference in Llangefni in the late 1990s. It wasn't in the Anglesea County Offices, shown above, but in a pretty snazzy nearby hotel.

The Anglesea Shire Council was extremely relevant, however, as the conference was under the auspices of the EU INTERREG Initiative, and the Ireland/Wales programme in particular, and the Council was a participant.

Llangefni is the shire capital of Anglesea (Sir Fôn) which is situated in the Welsh Wales heartland (cefn gwlad), the Welsh equivalent of the Irish gaeltacht. The greater part of the meeting was held through the Welsh language but non Welsh speakers were catered for by a small simultaneous interpretation unit.

I'm setting out this background because it is relevant both in the context of INTERREG proper but also in the differing status of the Irish and Welsh authorities concerned. Ireland is an EU member state and so at the top of the Irish INTERREG pyramid. The UK is the corresponding member state in the case of Wales and the relative actor at today's event was the London based Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

Chairmanship of the conference was shared between the Irish Department of Finance and the UK Department of Trade and Industry.

The morning chair fell to the representative of the DTI and I had the chair for the afternoon session.

In his opening remarks, the DTI representative laid claim to having the tougher of these two jobs. According to him, people would be wide awake during the morning session and would be actively participating in the proceedings, thus making the chairmanship very demanding (and by implication requiring a wide range of skills in which he clearly felt himself competent). The afternoon session, on the contrary, would be a doddle for me, coming as it was after a presumed liquid lunch when people would be at their most amenable, if at all conscious.

I'm well used to the English denigrating the Irish (in this case me) in my presence. My approach is not always to challenge them directly on the spot. You usually end up not winning, at least not to your own satisfaction. I'm more inclined, where possible, to wait in the long grass, which is just what I did here.

Come the afternoon session, I opened in Welsh, followed through in Irish, and finally ended up in English.

I was told afterwards it went down a bomb.

Good enough for me.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

EISTEDDFOD

I actually had an earlier, though remote, connection with Llangefni.

In the early 1970s I had put together a slide show (the then equivalent of today's Powerpoint) on the Welsh National Eisteddfod and I wanted my English language script translated into Welsh as I intended bringing the show to Wales, which I did, but that's another story entirely.

I was singing with the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir at the time and one of our members, Brian Powell, volunteered his mother to do the translation. She was the postmistress in Llangefni.

She did a very elegant translation but, unfortunately, it needed a few minor tweaks. Apparently she wasn't quite up to speed with the then current language of protest and I had to substitute some current terminology in place of a few of her literal translations.

Fortunately I had acquired the relevant vocabulary from the protest songs I had learned in an earlier attempt at learning Welsh.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

LIZ

A further, though admittedly very tenuous association with Llangefni, is Liz Rowlands, a former girlfriend of my friend Gareth Howell. I met Liz way way back and have a slide of her somewhere.

So there you have it, my time in Llangefni and some other associations with this capital town.