Mark Zuckerberg drinks pint wrong, leaving his Irish reputation in tatters

Despite being a strong supporter of the local GAA, Mark Zuckerberg took some damage to his position as an honorary Irishman this week after appearing to drink a pint of Guinness wrong.

Joining Limerick billionaire John Collison in a Two Johnnies-style fake pub he uses to host a tech chatshow, Zuckerberg took what might have been his first ever sips of the national beverage. As Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang described asking his AI agent to source “increasingly obscure teas”, a clip captured the Facebook founder reacting to the taste by making what one might describe as “a face”, taking several seconds to swallow.

“Why did he chew it?” asked one observer, while others suggested that he may accidentally have inhaled a mouthful of foam, a hazard for the inexperienced. A blow to his reputation, certainly.

It’s not compulsory to drink Guinness performatively any time you’re in public with an Irishman, but it does seem to help. How did Zuckerberg compare with other very famous people offered the chance?

He performed better than Queen Elizabeth II, who drank none, reacting to the pint presented to her at the Storehouse in 2011 with the same passive quarter-smile she might have given to a youth choir, but fared far worse than Barack Obama, who “gave it a right wallop” in Moneygall the same year, to a chorus of local-political yehows.

Overheard’s favourite effort is that of former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who appeared to appreciate his Guinness at Brogan’s, near the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, in 2015: a series of images capturing the pintman’s progress remain on the official United Nations website.

None of these people had a house in Waterford, however, and the standards are higher for Zuckerberg in his new guise as a possible JP McManus-style bazooka of funding for local hurlers.

Overheard scanned the entire two-hour video to seek more information, and neither Zuckerberg nor Wang come close to matching Collison’s pace: the native son’s glass is totally empty around minute 36, with the Meta execs still nursing glasses half full.

The full video does show the contents of Zuckerberg’s pint continuing to diminish, however, and, after being replaced with a new one, his final tally appears to be around 1.4 pints. As thirsty as a data centre, that fellah.

Duty calls

Zuckerberg paid €51,171,155 for Strancally Castle in Co Waterford, a price he could afford 5,100 times over, according to the latest estimate of his net worth. But things aren’t as simple for the Land Development Agency, tasked with turning taxpayer money into taxpayer housing as efficiently as possible.

It’s the dreaded red tape to blame, as the agency’s annual report lays out.

At two sites – Clonmore in Cork and Hollystown in west Dublin – sods were turned, homes built, ribbons cut and members of the public housed, all roughly according to plan.

So what’s the problem?

Delays, cursed delays. All things being equal, the agency would have acquired the houses from builder partners and resold them in time to get the stamp duty back under a recently added legal provision to let providers of “affordable dwelling purchase arrangements” do their work. The cost would have been zero.

But there is a time bar of a year applied to the refund, and the agency crashed into it. At Clonmore, closing the sale of the homes was delayed in 21 of 26 cases. It was left on the hook for €646,789.

Worse was the situation in Hollystown, where it got landed with a €2,751,982 stamp duty bill. It was relying on reclaiming this amount to make the development profitable, but time waits for no State agency, and it wound up being booked as a €1,888,107 loss.

Handily, the stamp duty is paid to the exchequer, so the taxpayer makes out okay.

Ireland’s blokey boats

When it comes to military might, some of Ireland’s neighbours wouldn’t mind if the Government pumped more resources into the defence of Europe’s watery Atlantic fringe. But in soft power terms, we dominate as ever.

The British might have sent HMS Invincible to the Falklands, but we rule the waves with the LÉ William Butler Yeats, the LÉ George Bernard Shaw, the LÉ Samuel Beckett and the LÉ James Joyce. Who needs dazzle camouflage when you have literary modernism?

Whose idea was all this? That of Vice Admiral Mark Mellett, former chief of staff of the Defence Forces and head of the Naval Service, whose forthcoming book Blue Heart recounts bringing the proposal to then minister for defence Alan Shatter in 2012.

“My reasoning was simple,” he said. “Wherever these ships operated, and whenever their names were broadcast over maritime channels, their Irish identity would be unmistakable. The names themselves became a force multiplier for Irish sovereignty, echoing hundreds of nautical miles wherever they were called.”

The eagle-eyed will note that all four vessels named before the policy was reversed were dedicated to blokes, a strategic weakness that might be picked up on by feminist critics patrolling the Rockall Bank area. Not the fault of Mellett.

“Had I my way,” he notes, “names like ... Maeve Binchy would have been fitting.”

Losing the thread

Back on dry land, author Colm Tóibín has been having a good time of it lately. Not long after the launch of an An Post stamp commemorating his novel Brooklyn, he was receiving an honorary degree from the 736-year-old University of Macerata in Italy this week, an event that featured someone delivering something called a “laudatio”.

In the midst of all the institutional acclaim, however, he made a misstep. Writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa recounted on her Instagram account an incident that took place as she prepared for an appearance on The Comfort Zone, a culture discussion programme cohosted by Tóibín with presenter Luke Clancy on Lyric FM.

Ní Ghríofa, author of the award-winning Ghost in the Throat and this year’s Said the Dead, suggested “one of my favourite films” to chew over: Phantom Thread, a 2017 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a couture tailor whose intense relationship with his muse, Vicky Krieps, gets him into trouble. Acclaimed as one of the best films of the 21st century so far, critics tend to reach for words such as “poignant” and “deft” to describe it.

What did Tóibín think? Hard to know: he accidentally watched The Phantom Menace, the divisive 1999 reboot of the Star Wars franchise featuring double-lightsabered antagonist Darth Maul and Jamaican-coded reptile Jar Jar Binks.