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Breakfast with a Leprechaun

July 18, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

It happened that we were in Ireland, as it were, last weekend, an Irish festival amid many similar national festivals in a town nearby. Our Irish festival is blessed with a rather antique Leprechaun, a wise person with twinkling eyes.

The last morning of the festival, I found myself sitting with our Leprechaun, to have breakfast before the doors were open at noon for the visitors.

They came and went as they pleased, visiting us and all the other festivals there were from many other lands. They came because they loved the music, the stories, the grand Irish dancers and the good basic food, laid out along the buffet all day and evening long.

We were sitting, enjoying all the goodness of a full breakfast, with eggs and meat, potatoes and fried bread, tomato sauce if you like it or any of the others. Coffee to perk us up for the long day into midnight.

There was plenty of news that day, coming from the lands to the south, of a noisy and strangely popular man who is making a great thing of himself because he very much wanted to be the country’s leader. He has succeeded in convincing a great many people he’s their man, even those who ought to know better.

Annoying as that man is, the Leprechaun was bored with hearing about him because he knew of a similar sort of fellow deep in his own green homeland far away. He was hinting at having a good deal to say about this and I was all about hearing the tale he had to tell. And so he did.

“There was this biggish fellow who arrived one day to the village where I come from, in Three Leaves County, called himself Hammer,” he began, “who decided he wanted to be the Chief when it wasn’t clear we even needed another Chief. The current Chief was elderly, I guess but he knew who we all were and what might be best for the land. Yet, he never made a decision without consulting those many of us who understood the problem, and had the tools to fix it. We passed ideas amongst us and came with solutions to everything just fine. But we were never in charge of anything. No one was; we were just a large community of folk taking care of whatever was needed. As old as democracy and run like that too.”

Turns out Hammer had been on to the old Chief to quit the hard work and pass the chair on to him but the Chief told Hammer that was not how it worked. The people in the county voted for a Chief.

Hammer put on an act of being really daft, pretending he couldn’t remember your name or making up stories that anyone knew where lies or nonsense. He pretended he didn’t know anything about everything but it was all an act and the one thing he did know was human nature.

While he was pretending to be a fool, flaying his hands around while he talked and talking about things that didn’t exist, he was also talking to people who didn’t have much to do about fixing things or helping the Chief. They were not always asked what they thought and Hammer started asking them what they did think about the Chief and those people who offered to do all the fixing.

The Leprechaun put down his cup with a bit of a bang as he recalled, “Before we knew it, there were folk going to ‘meetings,’ ‘get togethers,’ Hammer called them for people who had never been asked to help with anything,” said the Leprechaun. “Some of them were very busy with their work or their families. For the lame or the elderly, a lot of us saw to it they had all they needed in their lives. But Hammer called them the ‘shunned side’ of the county. Told them we never asked ’caused we wanted to be in charge, wanted to keep the Chief to ourselves.”

Hammer said it over and over that the ‘shunned side’ of the county’s population should demand a vote and they should vote for him. He would ask them for everything so they could be in charge. He would bring in much bigger businesses and build much better roads and create parks by getting rid of some annoying trees and everything the ‘shunned side’ wanted would come true.

Soon, there was anger about never being asked; about not having to repair other people’s roofs; about not having to walk an old lady’s dog.

One day though, a van arrived with police bringing a warrant to arrest Hammer for stealing from many people in many counties and towns. Hammer bellowed that the old Chief and his helpers had put the police up to this attack but someone admitted he had lent money to Hammer and so had others and none of them had seen any money back. 

“Nothing can stop this man in the south,” said the Leprechaun. “Only the true strong arm of the law can bring him and all his crimes down.”

He picked up his cup, saying, “If such a thing exists…”

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