Canúintí na Gaeilge

D'fhill Pygmalion chuig ardán Bhleá Cliath le déanaí, agus Risteard Murphy mar an tOllamh Ó hUiginn. Ag tús an dráma, deireann an tUiginneach rud éigin maidir leis an Sásanach atá níos fíoire fós maidir leis an nGael.

Dár leis an Ollamh, ní gá le Sásanach ach a bhéal a oscailt agus tugann sé fáth le duine eile bheith i bhfuath faoi. Sin cumhacht caniúnta. Agus más fíor é maidir le Béarla na Sasanach, nach bhfuil sé seacht n-uair níos fíoire maidir le Gaeilge na nGael?

Ceann de na rudaí is aite dom, agus mise im' dhaltaí Gaeilge, ná nach bhfuil fíos againn cad é an bealach ceart focail a labhairt. Oscail foclóir éigin ar an teanga eile, an Ghéarmainís, an Fhraincís, an Spáinnis, feicfidh tú cónas fuaimeanna na teanga a labhairt go dtí gurbh fhéidir le Géarmánach nó Francach nó Spáinneach tusa a thuiscint. Leagtar sa h-aibítir idirnáisiúnta iad, go dtí gurbh fhéidir comparáid a dhéanamh idir teanga amháin agus teanga eile.

Ach 'sna foclóirí Gaeilge, níl aon eolas fuaime le fáil. Tagann an fáth siar go athbheochán na Gaeilge 'sna 19ú hAois, agus scolairí ag teacht go hÉirinn chun staidéir a dhéanamh ar an teanga seo, Gaeilge. Ná déan dearmad gur tharla seo agus an drochsaol beo láidir fós in aigne na daoine - is dócha go raibh ceangal idir an Gaeilge agus an bás agus an easpa dóchais ag éirí tréan go leor. Murar mhaith leat maireann sa domhan nua seo, caithfidh tú leanúint leis an mBéarla agus an Ghaeilge a fhágail i do dhiaidh, chomh maith leis na fataí dhubha agus na mairbh.

Agus go tobann, tagann na Géarmánaigh seo agus - a Thiarna Dé - Sasánaigh féin níos déanaí ag insint duit gur cheann de na teangacha Eorpacha is sine agus is uaisle í an Ghaeilge, agus fán nóiméad anois a Dhaid go bhfaighfidh mé mo pheann luaidhe agus scríobhfaidh mé síos gach uile focal a titeann as do ghob.

Ar an ndrochuair, tháinig na scolairí seo ag an am céanna go raibh an Gaelic League agus an Cumann Lúchleas Gael faoi lánsheol. Rinneadh bainis idir an dhá ghluaiseacht - bíonn an Gael lag roimh an phlámáis, agus nuair a chualadar an chaint seo faoi teangacha uaisle na hEorapacha, chuaigh díreach isteach inár gcinn í.

Agus sin mar a chailleadh Eochroim. Mar bhí aidhm na scolairí dífríochta go deo idir aidhm luchta an athbheocháin, cén nár thuigeadh faoi déara é.

Nuair a tháinig na scolairí ar an nGaeilge, bhíodar mar Indiana Jones tar éis bualadh isteach ar domhan cailte. Bhí doras acu díreach isteach i domhain soineanta, mar sraidbhaile éigin i mbrionglóid Rousseau. Seo iad na daoine barbatha uaisle ar scríobh Rousseau faoi, agus seo fréisin a teanga féin.

Ach ba choir do lucht na h-athbheocáin gan bacadh leis an scolairí agus a domhain cailte, agus bheith cinnte go mbeidh an Ghaeilge chéanna ann ó cheann ceann na tíre. Ach bhí draoícht na scolairí agus brionglóid an domhan foirfe seo amach ar an mBlaiscéad ró-mhór rompu, agus theip orthu.

Rinneadh iarracht ní h-amháin gach canúint a thógáil slán, ach a litriú agus a graiméar féin a choinneáil. Smaoinigh noiméad cen chaoi a mbeadh an Béarla féin dá scríobhfaí gach focal a ndeireann Cheryl Cole mar a labhraíonn sí, agus conas a léifí a smaointe an lá ina dhiaidh agus tuigfidh tú go soiléir chomh fada a chuadar amú.

Inniu, tá an teanga scapaithe ina canúintí difríochta, greim an fhir báite ag gach ait ar a cheann féin agus an teanga féin ag meadú le gach glúin. Mar a dúirt an tOllamh Ó hUiginn i My Fair Lady, an ceolscannán iontach atá bunaithe ar bundráma Shaw, "Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!" Go bhfoire Dia ar ár teanga bhocht bhriste.

Mayo's Dogs of War - First Class Display from Second Class Citizens

It’s funny being a second class citizen. As Vincent Vega remarked about Europe, it’s not that like it's totally alien. It’s just the little differences.

If Meath, say, dog out a win on a day so miserable that it could have come right out of one of the more gloomy episodes of Peig Sayers’ life, then Meath are a team with mental strength, team that are never bet, a great bunch of bucks. If Mayo do it, it’s a further indication of the decline of Connacht football.

If Kildare, for instance, shoot nine first half wides then Kildare are a total football team and a credit to Kieran McGeeney and his lovely hair. If Mayo do it, it’s Mayo God help us all over again.

If Tyrone hold an opponent to one point in the second half it’s testimony to how organized and professional an outfit they are. If Mayo do it, it’s because Galway are but a shadow of past glories and hey, Connacht football is only for gimps anyway.

Mayo people, if they are wise, will ignore all this and take a huge amount of positives from the game yesterday in Castlebar. A friend of An Spailpín likes to quote Seán Boylan’s remark that football isn’t won in the head or the heart but in the belly.

Mayo showed some serious fight in the second half to hammer Galway like a nail and they should draw considerable strength from that as they look ahead to the rest of the summer.

Football is in a process of evolution. The conventional midfielder doesn’t exist anymore. There are goalkeepers, full backs and full forwards, and then there is the maelstrom of the middle third where only the strong survive.

In An Spailpín’s ideal world Willie Joe soars for the high ball under the clear blue skies before horsing it inside for Jimmy Burke or Noel Durkin. But in the real world, where you have manky weather and big question marks hanging over you, you fight for your very life.

And that’s exactly what Mayo did against Galway. They didn’t play in the Mayo style. They couldn’t – the TV really didn’t show what it was like to be out there in the teeming rain and into the teeth of a gale. Mayo fought like savages, and they came out on top.

Mayo were Kings of the Dirty Ball yesterday. Inspired by the O’Shea brothers, Mayo fought like junkyard dogs for every ball between the 45 metre lines and that’s why they won.

This is tremendous and heartening news for Mayo. John O’Mahony talked a lot about rebuilding, when he was actually destroying a team that got to two All-Ireland finals in three years, an achievement was never recognized, celebrated or built on for what it was.

The rebuilding has only started under Horan, and it’s on these young men that Horan has brought in that the future of Mayo will be built.

Mayo are a flawed team. I personally can live with that. I’ve seen lots of Mayo teams that were the best team in Ireland in June and long forgotten in September. I prefer this way. There’s plenty for James Horan to work on – he may need to consider buying a bicycle for Robert Hennelly to get up and down the pitch if Hennelly’s going to be taking many more frees, for instance – but yesterday was a heartening win for Mayo.

The country outside Connacht will hold its nose at the prospect of the Connacht Final, and that’s fine. Maybe the media will insist that all Connacht players be belled for the rest of the Championship, and have continuity announcers warn innocents that a particular afternoon’s football may contain scenes of a Connacht nature. And that’s fine too. We all have to live our lives according to our different lights.

Right now, in a lonesome Dublin exile, there is one happy Mayoman after seeing his team show a little bit of bite. It’ll be fun to see if anybody needs a rabies shot this summer after seventy minutes muzzle to muzzle Mayo’s Dogs of War.

FOCAL SCOIR: Big thumbs up to the beautiful and wonderful Vintage Irish Book Covers blog, from which I’ve sourced the photo. Wonderful site. Beautiful books.

There's Nothing a Mayoman Loves More than Losing to Galway

Mayo is luckier than other counties. Not only do we enjoy natural beauty of mountain, beach and oilfield – conveniently minded for us by our multinational friends in return for a box of beads and one mirror, slightly cracked – but we are also blessed by being able to get beaten by Galway every second year in the Championship.

There’s nothing we in Mayo enjoy more than getting up early on Sunday morning, ating the breakfast that’s been cooking on the hob since last night, into the match gear and then off to Galway or Castlebar to have an apple stuffed in the gob, a skewer shoved where the sun seldom shines and get roasted and served up with mashed potatoes and green beans by P Joyce, J Fallon or M McDonagh as appropriate.

It’s a relationship that the media understand well. They know that there’s only one team in Connacht really. Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim are grand for holiday homes. Mayo are just depressing, seeing them huffing and puffing and doing their best to almost, nearly, kinda win an All-Ireland, only to find some other way to munson it up before collapsing in crying, wailing heaps on high stools up and down Dorset Street, Dublins 1 and 7.

But Galway. Now there’s a team you can look up to. See, Galway don’t munson it up in Croker. Galway turn up like the aristocrats they are. Pointy shoes and expensive trainers peep out from under their flared jeans, as opposed to the plain black brogues of the unreconstructed bogger.

Galwaymen know how to lay a table and don’t drink their tay from the saucer. They have women like the Seoige sisters on their arms, with their irresistible “is that a copy of the Christian Brothers Irish Grammar in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” appeal. And when Galway do lose, hey, it’s no biggie. They go racing or ating oysters or watching plays or mime artists or the Lord God knows what. As opposed to sitting there sobbing one minute and being in murderous fury the next at the horrific, scalding injustice of it all.

It’s one of the pleasures of my life to have witnessed Galway’s resurrection in the ‘nineties, from the days when you had about a dozen turning up for training as they worked through the horrors of their 1983 choke-job.

There isn’t a Mayo man or woman whose heart didn’t sing with joy when Galway cancelled Mayo’s summer in May 25th, 1998. Oh happy day, we all said to each other leaving the ground, good old Galway will be able to build on the Maughan revolution to pox an All-Ireland against Carlow or Waterford or Kildare or someplace like that. It was such a weight off our minds.

And that’s why we’re looking forward to Sunday so much. Having seen off the appalling Tommy Lyons vista and dodged a series of bullets in London, nothing could be more wonderful this weekend for Mayo than for Galway, under yet another visiting manager, to magically weave the callow Under 21s and the wily veterans, none wilier than An Seoigeach himself, into yet another team that will storm their way to glory. Boy oh boy. I’m really looking forward to it. I can’t bloody wait.

Champions League Format Me Hat - in Defence of the Irish Summer

There are three events that mark every Irish summer. They are, in reverse order, the climbing of the Reek, the saving of the hay and the well meaning but hopelessly naïve call for the GAA to scrap the Championship and replace it with a “Champions League” style competition.

Keith Barr and Mick O’Keeffe are the latest men to make this argument. You can read them yourselves, as there’s no need to break down the piece sentence by sentence here.

The reasons the Champions League style format is nonsense are many. Here are the two biggest.

Inter-county competition will always be unequal as long as there are unequal populations in the counties and unequal interest in the GAA within those counties. That is a fact of life. You might beat one of those realities, as Offaly have in their history and please God will do again, but you can’t beat both.

The only way to create an equal playing field is do away with the birth qualification for players, so that counties could pick from the same pool. The cost of that would be soul of the Association itself.

An Spailpín suspects that the single most important thing that drives the GAA is pride of place. A Mayo team that can only be filled by Mayomen is worth one hundred All-Irelands lost. A Championship team of ringers and mercenaries is worth less than nothing.

Pride of place is more important than the game for the majority of people, myself included. Inequality is the price of regional identity. It’s a price worth paying.

The second reason is given to us by Doctor Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs. How we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

A Champions League style format doesn’t present us with things we see every day. It presents us with things we’ve never seen before. It seeks out things to covet, and ignores what we see every day, and think about every day, and look forward to every day.

A Champions League style format on the Barr/O’Keeffe model wipes out over one hundred years of history, and wishes us to pretend that a game between Mayo and Laois will have the same attraction as Mayo v Roscommon or Laois v Offaly.

Well, it doesn’t and it won’t, even though Laois played in Division 2 this year and the Ros Division 4. It might, of course, in the 125 years it’ll take the Champions League format to be as old as the current Championship, but it doesn’t seem sufficiently likely to bet the organisation’s future on it.

We don’t seek out things to covet. We covet what we know. Mayo playing Galway nearly every year isn’t boring. If Mayo playing Galway ever year is boring, then so is Christmas, so are the Galway Races, so is the Rose of Tralee and so is the US Masters. They are all infinite rhapsodies on a central theme. Always the same, always utterly different, every single time.

The Championship needs reform, of course. Even the Eifel Tower gets a soupçon of paint every now and again. An Spailpín’s own reform would be to return the Qualifiers to the Hell from whence they came. Nothing good can come of a system that supports the strong and punishes the weak. Failing that, deny a qualifier place for the current Champions, and see who takes their provincial championship seriously then.

But the chief thing An Spailpín would like to see is a little deeper analysis of what the GAA and the Championship actually are, rather than simplistic comparisons to what happens somewhere else.

Because there is nothing like the GAA Championship, anywhere. It’s doubly unique – a hugely popular amateur association that insists on loyalty of place being more important than exultation of talent.

Irish writers, poets and scientists should be pouring over this thing, and celebrating it for what it is – a unicorn, a magical mythical creature that somehow still exists in a base and materialistic world.

Instead, we get people wanting to burn the horn right off the unicorn to have it look like just another pony, and then wonder in a few years why nobody comes to see it any more.

Carthygate: RTÉ's Strange Relationship with the GAA

Carthygate is a sideshow, a storm in a teacup, a seven day wonder. But what’s really interesting about the standoff between RTÉ, Brian Carthy and the League of Managers is what it tells us about GAA journalism in this country.

The superficial analysis is that the problem developed when Michaél Ó Muircheartaigh stepped down and Carthy did not step up. But it’s more complex than that. It’s to do with the fact that RTÉ doesn’t seem to fully understand just what this GAA is, and how to properly reflect the Irish people’s love affair with it.

An Spailpín is of the opinion that the issue dates back a good quarter of a century to the 1980s, when Mick Dunne retired and Micheál O’Hehir got sick. Both those men were GAA men to the marrow. They had it in their DNA.

The men who succeeded them were not of the same breed. That isn’t to say they were bad at their jobs or didn’t love their wives and children. It’s only to say when we think of a Gael, a heartland GAA supporter, Mick Dunne and Micheál O’Hehir fit the template so much better.

In a way, RTÉ were spoiled by O’Hehir. There was no learning curve for the station; they had perfection delivered to them from the off. How important was Micheál O’Hehir? People of a certain age may remember he did a series of public safety ads to tell people how to navigate level crossings. And he did that because his was the most trusted voice in Ireland. If Micheál O’Hehir said something, you knew he was telling the truth.

But once O’Hehir was struck down by a stroke, it became clear that nobody ever sat down to decide what a GAA commentator should sound like. They never sat down to determine what makes a great commentator, and what doesn’t. Other sports have international comparators; when it comes to Gaelic Games, we’re on our own.

The giant shadow of Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh has to be addressed as well. RTÉ have been happy to present Ó Muircheartaigh as a National Treasure nurtured by the National Broadcaster, making his first broadcast in 1949 and his last in 2010.

Problem is, that’s only half the story. It’s only in the past twenty years or so that Ó Muircheartaigh became the voice of Gaelic games. While O’Hehir was doing the TV commentary, Ó Muircheartaigh was not doing the radio commentary. That was being done by Liam Campbell.

Liam who? Precisely.

The voice of Gaelic Games was a part time broadcaster until Micheál O’Hehir got sick. Before that, RTÉ were quite content to only call Ó Muircheartaigh in when they needed a dig out.

But now both Micheáls are gone, and the nation is coming to the realisation that the National Broadcaster doesn’t seem to fully get the National Games. This is perhaps why the League of Managers assembled to support Carthy in the first place – he might be a drone but he’s their drone, as opposed to the sort of mind that would put together RTÉ television’s extraordinary Committee Room.

The Committee Room is like a flatpack bed that’s been assembled by someone who’s never actually seen or slept in a bed before. He or she has followed the instructions and the bits are all there but as soon as you jump the mattress is like a board or you're impaled by a rogue spring or there’s some other damn thing wrong with it. The bottom line is that you just can't sleep in it. In the case against RTÉ’s understanding of the GAA, The Committee Room would be Exhibit A.

And then there’s Carthy, the man who won’t go away. It’s reasonable to suspect that part of the reason that League of Managers has assembled to support Carthy because he is a good GAA man. A man after their own hearts.

But the problem is that Carthy isn’t being asked to be a good GAA man; he’s being asked to be a radio sports broadcaster on the single biggest sports competition on the island, bar none.

RTÉ have ignored Gaelic Games for twenty-five years. GAA journalism has survived at the station because of the people’s great love for the games and because of good men like Des Cahill who seem to survive despite RTÉ structures, rather than because of them. But now RTÉ are reaping the whirlwind of their neglect.

Brian Carthy is not a commentator whom An Spailpín enjoys. I can’t expand on that as Carthy is infamously litigious and there isn’t much dough in the blogging to give me a cushion. But if it’s a question of taking sides between Brian Carthy and RTÉ head of sport Ryle Nugent – well, it has to be the fetch and the run and the kick and the point and the score to the man from Roscommon, Brian Carthy. God help me.