Her nephew had drawn Michael Collins with laser eyes.
"Superman has them," Cian said defensively, as she tried not to laugh. "So he should too. 'Cause he's, like, super."
Saoirse tilted her head at the page.
The figure did have a vaguely Collins-ish haircut and a suspiciously detailed belt, but the eyes were full-on comic-book beams zapping some unfortunate-looking tanks.
"Historically accurate," she said. "In a metaphorical sense."
"What's metty-forickle?" Cian asked, tongue sticking out as he coloured in the tricolour behind Laser-Eyes Collins.
"It means 'not actually true but sort of true underneath'," she said. "Like when Mam says she'll kill me if I'm late and I'm still alive."
Cian considered that.
"So… he didn't actually have laser eyes," he said, clearly disappointed.
"Sadly, no," Saoirse said. "What he had was… very good planning skills and a lot of cheek."
He accepted this with the resilient pragmatism of eight-year-olds.
On the coffee table, his school worksheet waited, the title printed in bubble font:
MY IRISH HERO
"So," she said, nudging the page with her foot. "Why'd you pick him?"
"Mam said you like him," he replied, frank as only younger relatives could be. "And he did the independence and the houses. Teacher said we could pick anyone, but he did loads."
She winced a little at "did the independence", like it was a solo project. Her historian brain twitched.
"Okay," she said. "We're going to complicate your life slightly."
He groaned theatrically.
"Auntie," he said, "I just want my homework."
"And you'll have it," she promised. "But we're going to add some extra heroes."
He eyed her warily. "Do I have to draw them all with laser eyes? That takes ages."
"Optional," she said. "Right. Tell me: who built the houses?"
"Builders," he said, with the air of someone humouring a slow adult.
"And who paid for them?"
"Eh… the government?"
"Which is…?"
He wiggled his fingers like jazz hands. "Bureaucrats."
She snorted. "I'm stealing that. But yeah. People doing boring jobs. And doctors who argued to demolish the slums. And women who campaigned. And engineers."
She nodded at him meaningfully.
"And grandads who paid taxes," she added. "And grannies who voted."
He frowned, pencil hovering.
"That's loads," he said. "Teacher said one hero."
"Then here's the trick," Saoirse said. "You pick one person to draw, but you tell the story so it shows all the others."
He blinked at her, then down at his page.
Slowly, the laser beams started to look less satisfying to him.
"What if," he said, "I draw the houses instead?"
"That," she said, genuine warmth in her voice, "would be class."
He thought for a second, then scribbled out the laser beams with conviction.
"Can I still put him in the corner?" he asked. "Small. Helping."
"Perfect," she said. "Stick in some nurses too. And maybe a lady with a clipboard looking stressed—that's a planner."
He grinned. "Like you."
"Exactly," she said. "Only taller and calmer."
He snorted. "You shout at the telly a lot."
"That's policy work," she said gravely. "Very technical."
As he drew, tongue once again poking out, Saoirse's phone buzzed on the arm of the sofa. A message from her boss.
BOSS: Cabinet subcommittee wants a brief on your Commission idea. 10 mins slot next week. Don't faint.
Her stomach did a small, delighted flip.
She texted back.
SAOIRSE: Dead proud & mildly terrified. Will bring charts.
She put the phone down and watched Cian colouring roofs.
A whisper of something slid through her awareness, like a notification arriving in a corner of her mind.
You have gained a new skill.
[Translation:] You can turn nerdy structural ideas into stories kids (and ministers) actually care about—allowing you to build coalitions bigger than policy wonks.
She blew out a breath.
"All right then," she murmured. "Story time."
The subcommittee met in a bland room with a spectacularly ugly carpet.
Four ministers, two special advisers, one grim woman from the Department of Finance, and a junior civil servant taking notes at frightening speed.
Saoirse stood at the end of the table with her slides ready and her heart doing ceilí steps.
"Right, Ms O'Shea," said the chair, flicking through the one-page summary. "You want us to basically create a super-body that bossed around housing, transport, climate and local government. Have I got that right?"
"Not boss around," she said, forcing her voice to stay level. "Coordinate. Like… like the hub in the middle of a wheel."
God, that was a weak metaphor. She could practically hear her inner critic sneer.
One of the advisers smirked slightly. Finance Woman looked unimpressed.
[Translation] nudged her sharply.
Tell them a story. Not a diagram.
"Minister," she said, switching off the projector. "Can I try this another way?"
The chair spread his hands. "You've got eight minutes."
"Once upon a time," Saoirse said, before her brain had a chance to scare her out of it, "there was a family who built a house in a floodplain because the planning rules weren't joined up with the climate maps."
One of the junior ministers perked up. Flooding was in his constituency.
"They drove an hour to work every day," she continued, "because the bus timetable had been designed by someone who never spoke to the housing planners. Their kids' school was miles away. So they spent four hours a day in the car. They ate badly. They were exhausted. One of them got sick from damp. They couldn't afford to move."
She let that sink in.
"These aren't bad decisions by bad people," she went on. "They're the logical outcome of a system that slices problems into separate bits. Housing here. Roads there. Health somewhere else. Each bit optimises for its own targets, and the person in the middle pays the price."
Finance Woman's expression shifted, just a fraction.
"Now imagine," Saoirse said, "if, twenty years ago, we'd had a law that said: any major housing plan must be signed off by a single Commission that looks at flood risk, transport, access to schools and hospitals, long-term energy use, and social impact. And that Commission had the data and the authority to say, 'No, not like this. Shift it there. Add a bus route. Change the standards. Or we won't approve it.'"
She paused.
"How many of our current crises," she asked quietly, "would be smaller or different if we'd thought that way?"
The room was silent, but in a charged way.
One minister who had grown up in a notoriously grim estate cleared his throat.
"So this Commission," he said. "It'll tell us no, will it?"
"Sometimes," Saoirse said. "It'll tell all of us no. Government, developers, councils. That's the point. To be the boring grownup in the room who remembers that twenty-year consequences exist."
The chair tapped his pen, thinking.
"Who appoints them?" he asked. "Because if it's us, we'll just stuff it with ourselves, and if it's not us, we're handing a lot of power to unaccountable technocrats."
She'd been ready for that.
"A mix," she said. "Appointments committee with cross-party representation, plus lay members chosen through a citizens' panel. Fixed terms overlapping election cycles. Clear remit. Annual reporting to the Oireachtas. And—and this bit is crucial—a legal duty to consult with citizens' assemblies for every major plan."
An adviser rolled his eyes slightly. "Assemblies," he muttered.
"Minister," Saoirse said, turning to him. "We have people willing to spend weekends reading briefing packs and arguing about bus lanes for free. That's gold. We might as well use it."
The note-taker snorted unexpectedly, then tried to turn it into a cough.
"You're basically proposing a Michael Collins for the 21st century," the Flood Minister said slowly. "Only instead of a person, it's a structure."
She blinked.
That was… not wrong.
"In a sense," she said. "We can't keep hunting for heroic individuals to fix systems. We have to build systems that make good outcomes the default."
Finance Woman folded her arms.
"And what happens," she asked, "when one of your citizens' assemblies decides they don't want a wind farm or a rail line in their back garden? When local democracy says no to national interest?"
"Then the Commission has to weigh it," Saoirse said. "Openly. With criteria everyone can see. Sometimes it overrules. Sometimes it adapts. But at least the reasons are on the record, not buried in a memo."
She took a breath.
"Look," she said, letting the formality drop a little. "A hundred years ago, we had a small group of mostly men making massive decisions in back rooms under pressure of war. They did a lot right. They also missed things, and some of what they got wrong took generations to fix. We're not in a war. We have better data. We know climate chaos is coming. We don't have the excuse of ignorance."
She met each pair of eyes in turn.
"This Commission is not a magic fix," she said. "You'll still get lobbied. Mistakes will still be made. But it makes it harder for us to be stupid in the same way over and over."
Silence held for a few beats.
Then the chair leaned back.
"All right," he said. "Draft us something tighter, with options on remit and costs. We'll see if it survives contact with reality."
It wasn't a yes. But it wasn't a no.
For a policy person, it was oxygen.
On the bus home that evening, Saoirse stared out at the city.
Old Collins-era estates, their brickwork softened by time, sat next to newer glass blocks. Bicycles wove between cars. A Class A storm warning scroll scrolled across the news ticker on a chemist's window.
"Sure we never had weather like this when I was a lad," an old man behind her said.
His friend grunted. "We did. It's just the telly never told you about it every five minutes."
Rain spattered the glass.
She thought of that imaginary family in the floodplain. Of her own parents' stories about mould on walls in the 80s. Of kids starting life in hotel rooms now.
[Systems Thinking] clicked and whirred, overlaying risk maps on bus routes, emissions charts on building stock.
She didn't feel like a hero. She felt like someone trying to tune a radio with thick gloves on.
Still.
In her bag, her notebook weighed warm and reassuring.
A page waited, blank.
She pulled it out, braced the notebook against her knee, and wrote:
If we build this Commission and it half-works, that's still better than no Commission that half-might-have. Our job is to leave behind fewer stupid traps.
She hesitated, then, on impulse, added underneath:
P.S. Thanks, Big Fella. We'll take it from here.
No glowing text appeared. No divine approval.
Just the bus turning a corner, the river flashing into view, and Dublin sprawling under a sky that couldn't decide whether to clear or break.
It would probably do both.
So would she.
Years later, a young councillor in a midlands town would stand in a community hall, facing down a furious crowd about a controversial new housing and wind farm plan.
She would think, briefly, that she'd much rather be anywhere else.
Then she'd remember a story she'd once read, about a man in a draughty hall a century earlier, saying, "We owe it to the Ireland we're trying to create to be alive to build it."
She'd take a breath and say, "I'm not here to tell you this is painless. I'm here to tell you we're doing our level best not to dump all the pain on your kids."
The crowd wouldn't cheer. But some would listen.
One of the teenagers at the back, there mainly because his friends were, would feel something click that he wouldn't have words for until he was older.
He'd go on to study planning—or law, or engineering, or social work, or something else entirely.
He'd complain about the Commission Saoirse had helped build—saying it was too slow, too cautious, too whatever.
He'd be right, and wrong, and partly right in ways he wouldn't see until he was older again.
The work would go on, as it always did.
Somewhere in a museum in Dublin, behind glass, an old copybook with cramped handwriting would sit under gentle lights.
Visitors would file past: school groups, tourists, bored teenagers who perked up at the juicier bits.
Most would forget the details.
A few would remember a line or two.
One or two, at some odd, quiet moment years later, would hear a little ping in the back of their minds when they decided to volunteer for a residents' committee, or run for office, or fight like hell for a flood defence in a town most people couldn't find on a map.
It wouldn't be magic.
It would just be people, with their skills and their tempers and their stubbornness, doing exactly what a long-dead revolutionary and a once-lost protester-turned-planner had written in the margins of their lives:
Use what you know now.
Make it a bit better.
Leave the door less jammed for the next ones.
Ireland, still under construction.