Chinese president Xi Jinping has told Micheál Martin that an Irish novel had sustained him when he was going through some of the most traumatic years of his life as a teenager.
During their meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Monday morning, the Taoiseach told Mr Xi that he had read the same book, The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich, in his youth and it had also made a profound impression on him.
“Coincidentally, I had read it as a late teenager as well, and had a first edition copy presented to me by an uncle of mine,” Mr Martin said.
“It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us, but there you are.”
Set in Italy during the revolutionary ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, the novel was a huge success after its publication in 1897. It struck a chord with Irish nationalists and later with communists in both the Soviet Union and China because of its evocation of a revolutionary culture and camaraderie.
The son of a senior Communist Party official, Xi was sent to the countryside as a teenager when his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution. In an experience he later embraced as a formative one, Xi spent his days doing manual labour and slept in a cave at night.
The Gadfly has a Cork connection because Voynich was the daughter of the mathematician George Boole, who taught at Queen’s College Cork, which later became University College Cork.