Pearse Doherty got into bother last week, when the Donegal Sinn Féin website identified him as a civil engineer. [Not just the website by the way, as shown by the image opposite, from Pearse’s byelection literature].
Here’s Pearse on Highland Radio:
“I’ve always been up front. I told people in many interviews that I left college after two years.
“I went into work in the field, I moved back to Donegal. I actually enrolled in LYIT in Letterkenny. I didn’t complete the course because I stood in the general election of 2002.
“The course I was doing was civil engineering, after two years of that course you get a qualification of civil engineering technician, I graduated with that.
“Where this arise from is a website… my profile has that I’m a civil engineer. I am a civil engineer technician.
“We’re in the heat of an election campaign, our opponents are going to blow it out of all proportion.”
That seems pretty straightforward.
So if Pearse was asked about his qualifications, you’d expect him to say, “I’m a civil engineer technician”, right?
As it happens, Pearse was asked just that question a few months ago. You can see his answer below.
Truth is Gerard, anybody can call themselves an engineer, regardless of competency learned in the field or on campus. Pearse is well entitled to call himself an engineer, despite his hesitant style of delivery. The same would not be so if he designated himself PhD (Medicine).
Well yes, I think the only protected title in Ireland is Chartered Engineer.
But that raises the question, why didn’t Pearse simply say that, instead of scrubbing every Sinn Féin website which called him a civil engineer?
In fairness to Pearse Doherty, he had only a few seconds to answer.