Ní raibh a fhios agam ar cheart dom an aiste seo a scríobh i nGaeilge nó i mBéarla. Sa deireadh bheartaigh mé í a scríobh i mBéarla, mar is ar dhaoine nach bhfuil Gaeilge acu atá dírithe na rudaí atá le rá agam. Ach as seo amach, ba mhaith liom níos mó a scríobh i nGaeilge, toisc go bhfuil claonadh aisteach ann in Éirinn an Ghaeilge a theorannú do 'spásanna tiomnaithe', mar a thugtar orthu. Sílim go bhfuil deis ag daoine cosúil liomsa – a bhfuil Gaeilge acu, fiú má tá a gcuid cumhachtaí liteartha i bhfad níos láidre i mBéarla – níos mó Gaeilge a scaipeadh i spásanna 'ginearálta'. Rinne mé imeachtaí le déanaí i nGearmáinis, in Iodáilis agus i Spáinnis. Cén fáth nár cheart dom úsáid a bhaint as mo chuid Gaeilge?
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I've been thinking more than usual about Irish recently. Partly that's because I was in Spain, doing two things: using my Spanish, and asking lots of questions about the status of minority languages there. This put two thoughts into my head. Thought one: why have I done events in virtually every language I speak besides Irish? Thought two: why do most Irish people pay lip service to our supposed national language while, in practice, letting it die?
Living abroad, I often encounter people who assume that Irish is a dialect of English. That's Irish English they're thinking of, the language the British imposed on us with characteristic violence over the past few centuries. Irish itself, i.e. Gaeilge, our pre-colonial language, is completely incomprehensible to monolingual anglophones, as any poor souls who tried to read the above paragraph without a lick of Irish on them can attest.
French, German, Spanish and Italian are all far easier for an English native speaker to learn than Irish. Since English is a Norman-Saxon hybrid, anglophones already know half the words and a lot of the grammar in any Germanic or Romance language. Meanwhile, English only helps with Irish to the limited extent that it would help with Russian or Polish. Just look at the pathetic song and dance that Brits and Americans make when they find themselves assaulted with our impossible Irish names. (I am my language and my culture and my name, so I am impossible for them, too.) If you're wondering why 'Irish is just a dialect of English' and 'Common Irish names are impossible for me to pronounce' are two thoughts that anyone can hold simultaneously, you have not encountered the deep capacity for doublethink of the Anglo-American mind.
So here's what happens in the Republic of Ireland. Outside the few remaining Irish-speaking areas (the Gaeltacht), 50,000 people every year attend gaelscoileanna, i.e. schools where Irish is the primary language. These people – plus the ones who go to school in the Gaeltacht and/or speak Irish at home – usually end up with good Irish. For the vast majority, though, Irish is taught as a foreign language and not given much time per week. Most Irish students don't even get the level of immersion that e.g. Northern Europeans do with English, because the Dutch, the Scandinavians et al are hugely exposed to English outside the classroom. Plus there's less extrinsic motivation. Northern Europeans know they'll need English to travel and work for international companies, while the sad truth is that many Irish people are not that bothered about Irish. (Or claim not to be. There's often insecurity and wounded pride afoot; I'm convinced many Gaeilge-belittlers are simply ashamed they don't speak it better.)
All this makes it unsurprising that few Irish people leave English-medium schools with decent Irish. I did, but it wasn't easy or automatic. In fact, I didn't do particularly well at Irish in school until my French teacher told my parents that she thought I had a gift for languages, which encouraged me to give Irish a proper try. I hadn't considered myself a particularly sharp linguist until that point. In hindsight, it's not mysterious why I'd shone more at French than at Irish: I was a voracious reader of Victorian anglophone novels. This entailed a) direct exposure to French since 19th-century writers love dropping it in, and b) even more exposure to Francophone sentence structure and cognate words. The syntax, idiom and vocabulary of literary English were a lot more gallic back when all educated people spoke French. I didn't have any more 'talent' for French than I'd had for Irish; I just found the language less intimidating because I'd seen more of it in the wild, and so I was able to approach French with curiosity, while Irish terrified me. (It still does, but the terror is intermingled with love.) There was also less of a psychological block to making mistakes and learning from them: nobody had ever implied that perfect French lay latent in my blood, that it was a birthright I simply had to claim. I knew from the start that I would have to work hard for every word of French I learned. We do with Irish, too, if we grow up speaking English; language acquisition – that harshest of mistresses – doesn't care about ethnicity. The process is blunt but clear. The more time you spend with a language, the better you will speak it. There are other variables, but time trumps all.
The school curriculum alone doesn't give us enough time with Irish to possibly expect to speak it well. 'Fourteen years', yes, I know, but years aren't relevant in language-learning; hours are.
The nominal class time is too short to begin with when you consider that it takes an estimated 2,000 hours for an English native speaker to reach a C1 level of Irish. What's more, these classes are taught through English – bizarrely, even when we're expected to analyse sonnets and plays and novels through Irish in our exams, most teachers still don't switch to Irish in the lessons – so maybe 20% of class time actually counts towards our Irish; the rest helps our English instead. Subtract yet another sizeable percentage of class time to account for the vexed teenaged attention span, and we probably leave school with a fair level of Irish relative to the hours we've truly spent. Most Irish people simply do not give ourselves enough of a chance.
I say 'give ourselves', not 'are given', because I believe in agency. The Penal Laws were repealed a while ago, lads! Nobody can stop us from studying Irish in our free time if we actually want to. You don't need to spent a cent on classes or textbooks. Just listen to podcasts, read the news, keep a diary, talk when you can, and look up grammar online whenever you notice a pattern that you're curious to see unpacked. That's how I approach all my languages and it's what works for me. What works for you might be different, but my broader point is that if you put in the time, your Irish will improve. You don't have to do that. You're Irish whatever you choose. But the choice is there.
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This brings me to the second, far more heartbreaking misapprehension about Irish I run into abroad. More often than you'd expect, I encounter surprise that my family doesn't speak Irish at home and that most Irish schooling happens in English.
It's not our fault in terms of the history. The British did everything they could to destroy our language, and they nearly succeeded. But 26 counties of Ireland have been independent for over a century. Still we don't even require our civil servants to speak Irish; still we force the last independent Irish drama company to close out of a lack of support. My work has been translated into Catalan and not Irish. I'm not saying I should be a priority – there's not enough government money for people who write in Irish, after all – but this goes to show how much funding there is for minority languages in Spain compared to Ireland. People in Northern Ireland can justifiably blame the government: there are nearly as many daily Irish-speakers in Belfast as in Dublin, and still these gaeilgeoirí have to fight for basic rights like bilingual signs because the Unionists pig-headedly block everything. That's a valid excuse. In Dublin, what's ours?
I don't even care if not everyone's bothered about Irish. You don't have to be. If you genuinely have no interest and are willing to own it, fair enough. What I can't stand, though, is passivity and blaming others. It's the same with the anglophones in Berlin who make a million excuses for not learning German: I have more respect for the ones who simply admit they don't want it badly enough to do the work.
'It's badly taught' easily makes the top ten list of things that Irish people love to say about Irish. We teach modern languages poorly in Ireland in general, but I'm not sure Irish lessons are especially bad. A fair amount of people making this claim have only used their French/Spanish/German as a tourist or in a classroom with fellow learners, which are not especially demanding contexts. Be sure you're putting your other languages to the same tests you've put your Irish – talking to native speakers with a heavy dialect who don't slow down or simplify, analysing 18th-century poetry through the language – before assuming your French/Spanish/German are in a substantially better state. Also bear in mind what I said above, that in those languages half the work is already done from having learned English. That's not the case with Irish, so it's not necessarily the teachers' fault if it's harder to learn. But the challenge is more rewarding precisely because it's not so easy. The difficulty is a feature, not a bug; you can learn to enjoy it for sure.
This is not to deny the impact of colonialism or post-independence governmental neglect. But these aren't reasons to write ourselves off. We can use the anger as motivation. Just think, 'Fuck every factor that tried to take Irish from me', and take the Irish back for yourself.
Some places to start: Tuairisc and RTÉ Gaeilge for news, TG4 for video content, and Raidió na Gaeltachta, Raidió na Life, Splanc and Beo ar Éigean for podcasts. If you're in Ireland then – unlike me – you can treat yourself to a print copy of the new newspaper An Páipéar. But my favourite way to find content on my particular interests in any language is to just search for it through the language itself. If you search 'leabhair', book podcasts will probably come up, or try 'scannáin' for film podcasts, etc etc etc.
To stress yet again, because experience has taught me it's necessary: I am not saying anyone has to do any of this to be Irish. I'm not the boss of you. Your time and decisions are your own.
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A few miscellaneous points of clarification on the questions I get asked most often about Irish by non-Irish people.
What's the difference between Irish, Gaelic and Irish Gaelic? Is there one?
Yes, there is.
'Irish' is Gaeilge, the national language of Ireland that we all spoke before the British colonised us.
'Gaelic' is a group of three languages within the Celtic family, and Irish is just one of them; the other two are Manx and Scots Gaelic. The word 'Gaelic' could refer to any of these.
'Irish Gaelic' is a phrase I have only ever heard Americans use. Technically it is correct, but it sounds ridiculous. Just imagine saying 'Russian Slavic', 'Italian Romance' or 'Norwegian Scandinavian'. There is no surer way than saying 'Irish Gaelic' to indicate that you've never been to Ireland.
So. 'Gaelic' is vague, 'Irish Gaelic' is corny. What option are we left with? It's very simple: just say 'Irish'.
That said, it's not unheard of for people within Ireland to say 'Gaelic', particularly native speakers of Ulster Irish. Flann O'Brien himself sometimes referred to the language that way. When they're addressing fellow Irish people within Ireland, there's little ambiguity as to what they mean. There's also less cause to suspect that they're subconsciously reducing Irish to a babble of folksy Celtic patter. But you still risk sounding condescending if you say 'Gaelic' as a non-Irish person.
When I'm speaking German/Italian/Spanish/French, I refer to my national language as 'Irisch'/'irlandese'/'irlandés'/'irlandais'. I've had laypeople try to correct me, telling me that I must mean 'Gälisch'/'gaelico'/'gaélico'/'gaélique', but the actual linguists in the country are on my side, and so I stand my ground.
Why don't most Irish people speak Irish?
British cultural genocide, plus policy failure since independence.
Why don't Irish people write in Irish?
Many do. But for those of us who don't: British cultural genocide, plus policy failure since independence.
Why do Irish people say [insert thing] in English?
Probably it came from Irish. I love Irish English, not least because of the traces of Gaeilge that are everywhere once you know how to spot them. 'Giving out' (complaining) and 'after doing something' (you've just done it) are direct translations from Irish grammar: táim ag tabhairt amach, táim tar éis é a dhéanamh. We use 'fierce' as an intensifier because it sounds like the Irish 'fíor-' ('truly').
In my most pessimistic moments re: the future of Irish, I take some comfort in the fact that our linguistic heritage will always survive through Irish English.
*
Anyway.
I am in profound winter hibernation after too much travel, and am reading Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst.
Till next time,
N
It's very interesting how similar what you outline here is to a very commonly expressed shame within most Asian-American communities, down to the stumbling blocks: many of us actually speak English at home, there's often very little opportunity to practice organically with others, and we often have a general shame about the concept of this language being your birthright.
Obviously the actual situations are not that comparable, as it's completely different to be struggling with speaking a minority language vs. the official language of your country (for one, informal language schools run out of people's garages aren't the same sort of systemic policy failure if they don't truly teach you a language) but there's the same sense of -- nobody is forcing us to speak English in public/amongst ourselves anymore. Why don't we put in the time to learn? The originating culture isn't halfway around the world anymore, you can listen to the music and watch the movies as easily as bringing up a streaming app.