Plot

As Abbey contemplates the likelihood that her medical license will be taken away the following day, she grumpily attends a big White House party for her birthday. Bartlet receives another visit from decorous British Ambassador Lord John Marbury

Lord John Marbury

Lord John Marbury is a recurring fictional character on the television show The West Wing, played by Roger Rees. The character appeared in five episodes, first as an informal aide to President Josiah Bartlet during a foreign relations crisis, and later within the show as the United Kingdom's...

, who argues against Bartlet's meeting with a member of Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin is a left wing, Irish republican political party in Ireland. The name is Irish for "ourselves" or "we ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". Originating in the Sinn Féin organisation founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it took its current form in 1970...

. Meanwhile, Sam meets with Senator Enlow, who is blocking the funding of a controversial scientific project that would cost billions, and is visited by his old college professor who harangues him to make peace with Enlow (whom Sam can't stand) to fund the project.

Donna discovers that the national border near her Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 birthplace has been redrawn slightly—making her officially a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. Abbey, C.J. and Amy Gardner mischievously sneak out of Abbey's birthday party to gossip and get drunk. Donna joins them because her new citizenship status has kept her out of the party, and makes a pointed comment that brings the consequences of Abbey's actions home to her. Abbey then tells her husband that she will agree to surrender her license for as long as he is the President. Donna finds out she will be able to become a U.S. citizen again with a simple written test.

The title "Dead Irish Writers" comes from a discussion Toby and Lord John Marbury have regarding a controversial figure who has been invited to the White House. Marbury claims that the author is a member of the political wing of the Provisional IRA and repeatedly states that he "cannot come to the White House." Marbury then tells Toby that the conflict between Ireland and the UK is centuries old and the United States, because of its youth, cannot fully understand it. Marbury and Toby then exchange a series of quotes and loosely link them to the long-standing conflict involving Great Britain and Ireland. At the end, Marbury obliquely tells Toby that precisely because he is an enemy in the conflict, the IRA leader should come to the White House after all (though official policy remains opposed to such a meeting). Interestingly, of the three quoted authors—Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

, James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

, and Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...

—only one of them, Joyce, was natively Irish. Kipling was born in Bombay, India to English parents, and O'Neill was born in New York, which has had a large Irish community since the Great Famine of 1848.

External links

• The West Wing Episode Guide