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Drawing a term from Gaelic folklore, Dowd calls him "the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval."

Belfast’s Lyric had to cancel its co-production of 1984 with Bruiser Theatre Company but instead launched the initiative New Speak: Re-imagined, in which Northern Irish talents including Amadan Ensemble, Dominic Montague and Katie Richardson respond to the lockdown crisis.

He had heard of one whom he did not wish to meet, the Green Harper: also of a grey man of the sea whom islesmen seldom alluded to by name: again, there was the Amadan Dhû ... but at that name Coll made the sign of the cross, and remembering what Father Allan had told him in South Uist, muttered a holy exorcism of the Trinity.

"Aren't you the amadan to be biting the tongue between your teeth?" he said.

He asked the Amadan who he was, and what he had done to have the impudence to come there and meet him.