This past week saw both St. Patrick’s Day (“March 17 observed by the Roman Catholic Church in honor of St. Patrick and celebrated in Ireland in commemoration of his death”) and the Prime Minister of Ireland visiting the United States, prompting many people to turn to the dictionary to look up taoiseach.
Irish Taoiseach abruptly leaves DC gala attended by Biden after testing positive for Covid-19
— (headline) CNN, 16 Mar. 2022
Taoiseach is the Irish term for “prime minister”; the word comes directly from Irish, in which it has the literal meaning of “leader, chief.” While the pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country, in the U.S. it most often is encountered as Tee-sheck.
Simon Harris was three years into a university degree when he dropped out in 2008.
A job had come up as a parliamentary assistant to an Irish senator, and Mr. Harris, an ambitious 20-year-old from a coastal town in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, saw “an opportunity to try and make a difference,” he later told Hot Press, a Dublin-based magazine.
He never looked back. On Tuesday afternoon, at 37, he became the Republic of Ireland’s youngest ever head of government, the culmination of a swift political rise to a post he has long aspired to.
[…]
Mr. Harris was propelled to the leadership of Fine Gael by the surprise resignation of his predecessor, Leo Varadkar, last month. The party governs Ireland in coalition with two others, and Mr. Harris became taoiseach (pronounced TEE-shock), or prime minister because of a quirk of the coalition arrangement rather than a reflection of any national public endorsement.
| Megan Specia, Simon Harris Just Became Ireland’s Prime Minister. Who Is He?
Actually, the Irish legislature struck down the use of ‘prime minister’ in English, and determined that the term ‘taoiseach’ be used in both Irish and English, a practice Specia and the New York Times seem to be trying to circumvent.