SOMETIMES I remember, and not without affection, the two men in a play by Moliere who were delighted to discover that they had been speaking prose all their lives.

I suspect that many people would be surprised to discover that they had been philosophers all their lives. The very word 'philosophy' disturbs some minds. They see it as confined to great thoughts.

And they associate it with men with lofty brows, and living far above what Scott Fitzgerald called "the hot struggles of the poor".

All children are philosophers: they need to be. They are following their instinct for self-preservation. Later, when they need to be less acutely aware, they tend to speculate: philosophy is essentially a questioning, a quest for truth.

I have felt philosophy in all kinds of situations, in the bog and in the meadow and in the pub, before and after hours. Much pub talk is about sport but often it deviates into philosophy. You begin wondering about the value of sport, especially after your team have lost.

When I went to University College Cork, I intended taking up philosophy -- but when I read the curriculum I discovered that all the philosophers were Catholic. To me, the idea of Catholic Philosophy was about as sensible as Catholic Mathematics.

And so I studied philosophy in my own amateur way, by reading the great philosophers of the day who were totally ignored in the course in Cork University.

They included Albert Camus and A J Ayre and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was the most influential of the three, or perhaps only the most popular. He was born in Austria in 1889 of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He came to Manchester University to study aeronautics, but after a few years there he discovered a book that changed his whole life. It was a book that contained essays by different philosophers: one of them, Bertrand Russell, had a profound influence on Wittgenstein and for the rest of his life he was devoted passionately to philosophy.

He had one great ambition: he hoped to find a place where he would be utterly free from distraction and give his whole time to study. He was told by a friend that in Connemara he would find peace of mind and freedom from care.

He rented a house in Connemara and settled down there looking forward to producing as pure a work as thought and study could. He looked forward to his solitude. He found a simple life, apart from having to go to the well three miles away and for groceries about five miles away and to get milk and turf from his next-door neighbours. That was the easy part.

The word had got around that he was a very important man and had great influence with the government in Dublin. Almost every day, he had people coming to him about getting money for disability and for various disorders. It dawned on him that he had come to live in a place where most of the people were in very poor health, even though most of them looked extremely healthy. He did what he could. He wrote to various departments, sometimes with success. The people liked him and he liked them, but he wondered why such fine-looking men and women always seemed to be sick.

Then one day a truth dawned on him. Often as he walked by the local lake he used to stop and watch a middle-aged man, and admire his skill in casting flies. That was all right until one day that same man came to him and asked him could he get him the blind pension.

And so next day Wittgenstein settled his affairs and took the bus to Galway and the train to Dublin. It was night when he arrived at Kingsbridge Station; across the river he saw a bright sign that said Aisling. He decided it was a hotel and he crossed the bridge and took up residence there. And in that hotel and in the greenhouse in the Botanic Gardens he did some of his greatest work.

There was an irony in all this: there was a little group of us who were devoted to philosophy but we didn't know that one of our heroes was living in Dublin -- until he was gone. We would have loved to have met him but maybe he mightn't have liked to meet us. But it wasn't to be.

If I happened to be Minister for Education, I would introduce philosophy in the primary schools. Like mathematics, it depends on logic, and like mathematics, you can build it up brick by brick. The sooner you teach children to think, the better. I doubt if any minister will be radical enough to introduce philosophy to primary education. There is, however, a less radical means: there is no reason why Latin couldn't be taught in primary school. In England I taught Latin to boys aged between eight and 10 and they loved it. This little revolution might meet resistance from the teachers: they might say that they are unqualified to teach Latin. Anybody can teach Latin if you have a good textbook; you need only keep a few pages ahead of your pupils.

The benefit of this change would be huge: it might mean

that boys and girls would continue with Latin in secondary school -- at present it is in grave danger of extinction.

The benefits would include a foundation for at least six languages -- French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, English and German. This may seem an extravagant claim but its relevance to the Romance languages is obvious. A great many words in German have come from Latin; Latin is interwoven into English in a way that makes it almost an essential study for that language.

The pronunciation would cause no difficulty. I can only hope that this revolution comes. Even in such a pragmatic aspect as spelling, it would benefit students of English enormously -- a great many words are of Latin origin. In our Oireachtas, we employ people to translate English into Irish; we might also employ people to translate English into Latin; we could also employ people to translate Oireachtas English into English.

If I happened to be a captain of industry and needed a secretary, I would employ one simple test. The candidates might be fluent in several languages and highly skilled in computer technology but I would depend on this one simple test -- distil about 1,000 words into about 300. That is the best test of intelligence that I know.

In this country at present we have the Press Council; we could have a different kind of council, a body that deals with wild and whirling words authored by influential people. I will give an example: Bertie Ahern, at Charlie Haughey's graveside, told us that he was "a patriot to his fingertips". He should have been hauled before the appropriate body, in chains if necessary, to explain his words. In his speech at last year's Ard Fheis, he said that the Opposition were incapable of governing the country. Bertie is a decent and intelligent man but he shouldn't be allowed to get away with such statements: the Opposition, after all, represent about 55 per cent of the people. That statement was an insult. Of course there is such a thing as political licence but there should be a limit. I propose that we have a Ministry of Truth.

The health of any society depends to a great degree on the integrity of its journalists.

And in this generation in Ireland the generality of our journalists have not distinguished themselves. In fact, we have seen quite clearly how Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s. Some of our journalists were fellow travellers of the Provisional IRA; many others by their silence gave consent. They may have been opposed to that movement but they failed to speak out. My opinion of that body was expressed in The Kerryman at a very early stage and also in some magazines. There weren't many other voices as explicit -- John Healy of The Irish Times, Des Rushe of the Irish Independent, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Hugh Leonard. There were others of course but they weren't as prominent because they hadn't the same amount of space.

When we look back in anger at the case of Charlie Haughey, we can only wonder how he got away with so much for so long. Some journalists appeared to be afraid of him; others idolised him. I could sing out a list of names of his idolisers but I do not want to embarrass them. My opinion of him was expressed in The Kerryman at a very early stage of his career and repeated in the Evening Press.

We will come to the present day because hindsight is a drunk bond. At present there are good journalists amongst us who seemed to have lost not so much their integrity as their powers of perception. They are almost embedded.

Of course, I stayed up to hear George Bush's address on the State of the Union at the end of last month. It was astonishing to hear and to see. Some people seem to have endless powers of self-deception: the alarming aspect of George's speech is that he seemed to believe it himself. So did his audience: he got a standing ovation about every three minutes but of course the whole thing was make-believe. It was the bland leading the bland. He admitted that the economy is going through a rough time but of course he would put it right. He spoke eloquently about how the US is safeguarding democracy all over the world.

It was a great pity that there isn't a custom that would enable people to question him at the end of his speech. He would be asked to explain the many years of shameful interventions in Latin America and in Africa and in the Middle East.

I waited with unbated breath to hear his comments on Iraq. He told us that soon all would be well: there is a government in power and it will restore law and order and democracy. George hasn't long more to remain in office but unless he is badly informed or wilfully blind he must know he will go home and leave a terrible mess behind.

It was a great pity that somebody in his audience hadn't the right to stand up and ask him about his recent visits to Saudi Arabia. He was received there in a manner that could hardly be equalled if Mohammed himself had come down from the heavens. There were even dancing girls to entertain him.

Despite the charges last week for six men, has everyone in America forgotten the man who plotted the attack on the Twin Towers and the men who carried it out were mostly Saudi Arabians? Of course the man who plotted could be arrested by his fellows and given over to the US but it will never happen because Saudi Arabia is a great source of oil for America.

Saddam Hussein, who was utterly innocent of the September 11 attacks, paid the ultimate price. His humiliation and execution makes us wonder if the Americans are a civilised people or if they are blinded by their leaders.