It was a blustery July night in Galway, as if somehow November had finagled a new home on the calendar and banished summer for the remainder of 2017. Savoring the warmth of a banquet hall on the NUI-Galway campus, members of the Eugene O’Neill International Society and their guests gathered to dine; to honor Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne for their star turns in O’Neill's plays, particularly in Long Day's Journey into Night in 2016; and to enjoy President Michael D. Higgins's account of memorable evenings in the theatre viewing O’Neill's masterworks. Sitting with my wife, daughter and fellow banqueters—and having enjoyed speaking with President Higgins before—I recalled President Mary Robinson's learned remarks twenty-five years earlier at a convocation of Joyceans at Trinity College in Dublin. Irish presidents are expected to be well-read. And, much like a president's words, his or her reading matters.

Listening to President Higgins, my American friends and I felt more than a twinge of envy that our Irish colleagues could claim such a cultured man as their leader (fifteen months later, they reclaimed him when he won a second seven-year term). More than a published poet and theatregoer, Higgins is also a perceptive commentator on modern Irish literature, revising his 2012 remarks at a Dublin conference dedicated to Bernard Shaw's work to introduce the anthology Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (2020).