The Delicate Etiquette of Correcting Someone's Irish

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The fortnight-long Seachtain na Gaeilge – yes, it is odd if it’s called a week and runs for a fortnight – has just ended. How many people noticed? How many people knew it was on in the first place?

In theory, Seachtain na Gaeilge is about encouraging people to make a special effort to use whatever Irish they have for that week (or fortnight, if you insist). But to use it for what? If you go down to the shop and order a mála milseán, will young Svetlana behind the counter have the first notion what you’re talking about?

The nation’s attitude to the first language was discussed in a piece in the Irish Times on St Patrick’s Day by Úna Mullally who, as well as being an Irish Times columnist, is also a presenter on TG4, and thus knows whereof she writes.

In the Irish Times piece, Mullally makes two points. Firstly, she believes that people who speak Irish outside the Gaeltacht should get the same support for their endeavours in speaking Irish as people who live in the Gaeltacht. Secondly, she believes that Irish that is not fluent is as worthy of celebration as Irish that is.

The problem with the first point is that Mullally contradicts herself in her own piece. In her third paragraph, she claims that “given the massive population of young people attending all-Irish speaking schools in the greater Dublin area, there’s an argument for Dublin eventually even being the largest Gaeltacht in the State.” Two sentences later she writes “if you want to ‘keep up’ your Irish in the capital, you’re pretty much on your own.”

Both conditions can’t be true. If Dublin is hopping with Irish speakers, then you cannot be “pretty much on your own” in keeping up your Irish. To use some broken English, the case has gotta be dis or dat.

Mullally’s second point in noble in thought and intent. She speaks of celebrating efforts that people make to speak Irish even if their Irish in poor, writing that, for those who are not fluent, “the intent to speak …[Irish] … is as valid as the poetic prose that flows from a native speaker.”

The problem with this noble thought is that it has very little bearing on reality. Concepts like “celebration” and “validity” have nothing to do with talking. “Celebration” and “validity” are words that have to do with equality politics. They are not about communication, understanding and being understood.

There’s a reason a person’s ability to speak a language, any language, is graded. If the person’s ability is insufficiently good, then that person can’t be understood. Celebrations and measures of value don’t come into it. The person may be a saint or a sinner but we’ll never know because he or she can’t tell us.

What we’re left with, then, is tokenism. I pretend that I can speak Irish and the person to whom I’m speaking plays along, while we both know that if either us hit a little bump we can drop in an English word, we both being – amazing co-incidence, I know – fully fluent in that language. But what we serve by doing that I can’t imagine.

Correcting someone’s Irish is seen as one of the rudest things we can do. The only Irish language book to ever make Number 1 in the Irish booksellers’ charts was Breandán Ó hEithir’s Lig Sinn i gCathú, first published in the mid-1970s. There’s a scene at the end of the novel where two professors are roaring at each other over the inscription on a plaque to commemorate the 1916 Rising.

One man insists the plaque should read “D’ardaigh siad an tine beo,” and the other says it should read “D’ardaigh siad an tine bheo.” This is not the celebration of validity that Úna Mullally was writing about, but it is a fairly accurate snapshot of what’s been going on in the country since Independence – fighting with each other has been more important than promoting the language.

But if no-one’s Irish is corrected, who’s ever going to get it right? Seán Ó Ruadháin, the great Irish scholar from our own County Mayo, wrote in frustration once that the idea of broken Irish being better than clever English was only meant to last for a while – it was never meant to be a licence for bad Irish.

Ó hEithir’s beo/bheo difference is a relatively subtle one. But there’s a picture floating around the internet currently of a man who’s made the most tremendous blunder in Irish, and he’s now stuck with it forever.

The picture is of a man who had a motto in Irish tattooed onto his back, right between the shoulders. The motto is from the poem Invictus, which Nelson Mandela famously recited to himself during his long years of captivity on Robben Island. The lines read:

I am master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

There are two ways of saying “I am” in Irish – “tá mé,” and “is mise.” This man chose “tá mé.” He should have gone with “is mise.”

This tattoo is valid celebration of the Irish language by Úna Mullally’s lights. By someone else’s lights, it’s a disaster. Firstly, the man is stuck with it. It’ll only come off if he’s flayed, I believe, and bad and all as the translation is, getting skinned alive would be worse. But what’s worse is the confusion it creates.

Someone who’s struggling to learn when to use is mise and when to use tá mé will get confused if he or she is not shown good examples at every turn. Bad Irish means bad examples. Bad examples mean worse Irish, and worse Irish will eventually mean no Irish at all.

If the cost of saving the language is hurt feelings, it’s cheap at the price. I’m sorry Dublin. You’ll just have to offer it up.

Not Minding Our Language

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The great man has moved on. In years to come, grandchildren will climb up onto the old people’s laps and ask “where were you when you heard the awful news that he was gone?”

“Who?,” you’ll say. “Nelson Mandela?”

“No,” they’ll say. “Seán Ó Curreáin.”

To describe the resignation of Ireland’s first ever Coimisinéir Teanga as a storm in a teacup is unjust to both weather and delph. Ó Cuirreáin’s resignation mattered in that world within a world that is the Irish public service, and even then in a very small corner of that.

To the country outside, the public that is passionate about saving the language, the public that pays lip-service to the language by singing the first three words of the anthem in Croke Park and the public that genuinely hates the language, Ó Cuirreáin’s resignation mattered not a jot. The world kept on turning just the same.

And that’s a pity. It’s to Ó Cuirreáin’s supreme credit that he did resign when he realised that there was nothing for him to do. Others in his place would have hung on like grim death, recognising a handy number when they saw it. So Ó Cuirreáin is to be celebrated for his patriotism.

What is to be regretted is that it came to this. That there isn’t sufficient vision to properly protect the language and hand it on for future generations, rather than see a slow race to the grave between those who would kill the Irish language by neglect and those who would kill it by incompetence, like pandas rolling over their cubs.

What is the job of the Coimisinéir Teanga? The Coimisinéir Teanga exists to ensure that the Official Languages Act is enforced. What does the Official Languages Act do? The Official Languages Act ensures that anybody who wants to conduct business of the state in the state’s first language, Irish, may do so.

So let’s think about that for a second. Remember back in September when the Government pulled the plug on the non-use exemption for motor tax and people had to queue for hours to register their vehicles before the Revenue took another slice out of them? Imagine queuing for that long, and then queuing some more until they found someone behind the desk who could speak Irish to you. You’d want to have thought of bringing a packed lunch before you left the house. And maybe a sleeping bag.

In an ideal world, of course you could do your business with the state in the first language of the state. In the real world, you’re grateful for what you can wrestle off them before whatever amenity it is you’re after is taxed, confiscated or otherwise disappeared.

The policy of mass translations and government jobs in perpetuity is a classic cub of the Tiger. The Government of the early 2000s, swimming in money, much preferred to throw great bags of the stuff at problems rather than work them out. Easier to set up a Coimisinéir Teanga to ensure you could apply for the pension or an pinsean as you pleased than to think about how differently the Irish think about their language now, the greater level of positivity that exists towards the language in the Galltacht, the area outside the Gaeltacht, and see if there’s any symbiosis that can be built between the two.

Irish will never return as the first spoken language of the country as long as English remains the de facto world language, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a huge role to play in the country. Unfortunately, finding out exactly what that role could be would be hassle; better to just write a cheque and forget about it for a while.

Therefore, we find ourselves in a situation now where the problem remains and there isn’t any money to throw at it. And now that belts are being tightened, the voices who are anti-Irish are suddenly getting louder about wastes of money on a “dead language.” The Government are unlikely to appoint another Coimisinéir Teanga – what would be the point? That will only cost them money and if Ó Cuirreáin couldn’t squeeze blood from a stone it’s hard to see the next man or woman doing it either. And in the meantime, the language is left to drift further towards the rocks.

Besides; ensuring the language is vibrant and well is not the job of the Comisinéir Teanga, and nor does it have anything to do with the Official Languages Act, 2003. That is a whole other can of worms.

The body in charge of the wellbeing of the language is Foras na Gaeilge, a cross-border body set up in December, 1999, as a dividend of the Good Friday Agreement. It is one of the more low-profile public bodies, to say the least, and far be it for a hurler on the ditch to assess what he knows little about.

But I do know this much: there is no received pronunciation in Irish. There is no dictionary in Irish, where Irish words are defined in the Irish language just as the Oxford English Dictionary defines English words in the English language.

There is a terminology board, whose responsibility it is to create words for things that haven’t existed before. Fighting over what is “pure” Irish and what isn’t is one of the things that scares people away from the language, but the current “correct” translation for tweet, as in the social media communication is “tvuít.” If that’s Irish, I wouldn’t like to hear Klingon.

So farewell, then, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, broken on the wheel of the nation’s hopelessly mixed-up attitude to its own language. I hope whoever takes over has more luck.

Go-Go Gaeilge with Girls Aloud

An Spailpín Fánach knows that if there's one thing that the Irish love to do more than sing, it's learn their beloved native language. As such, as a special back-to-school treat, here are Girls Aloud singing the Tommy James and the Shondells classic I Think We're Alone Now, made so famous by Tiffany a generation later, with subtitles added as Gaeilge (thumbs up to Noel Walsh of Northern Sound radio for the subtitling technology).

Pedants will note that the subtitles are not literal translations. Well, duh! If they were literal, how could you sing them? These match - reasonably - to the scansion of the original, thus allowing full expression of the heady combination of poptastic tunes and patriot-astic príomhtheanga. Leanaigí ar aghaidh, a chailíní, leanaigí ar aghaidh....







Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, music, ceol, Gaeilge, Girls Aloud

Irish Exemptions - Who's Fooling Whom?

There is a story in this morning’s Irish Independent that An Spailpín Fánach just can’t get his head around.

A scholar in Cork is being denied entry to UCC because the NUI demands Irish, and this young lady’s exemption was not on the records. And this is terrible because of the Herculean effort she made on the final day of the exam, sitting three three-hour exams, in Religious Education, Italian and Japanese.

Let’s wind back a second. Once the CAO sort out the problem, she’s in. It’s a non-story. But what is interesting are the remarkable circumstances of her Irish exemption.

This scholar can’t study Irish. She has an exemption from studying Irish because she’s dyslexic and from the North originally. But she can manage to study Italian and Japanese.

They don’t speak Italian or Japanese very much among the dreary steeples of the Occupied Territories. And if dyslexia makes Irish difficult, can you image what it does to Japanese, which isn’t rendered in Roman letters but in its own kana script? So how come she can’t – as distinct from won’t - study Irish but can study Italian and Japanese? I don’t get it.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. And shame on the Indo for printing this rubbish in the first place.




Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, Gaeilge, education

Free Download - A Learner's Guide to Irish

About two years ago your faithful narrator took a look at such books as exist for adults to learn Irish. One of the ones I recommended most warmly was A Learner’s Guide to Irish, by an American academic called Donna Wong.

During the week I got mail from friend of the blog Rob, who told me that although Doctor Wong’s book is now out of print, it is now available in its entirety to download free from Cois Life, the website of its publisher. Anybody with any interest in the language should take the time. The book is solid gold.

The failures in the promotion of Irish have been many down the years. There are countless children’s books about learning Irish, because publishers know that there is a captive – in every sense of the word – audience there. But for adults who wished to go back there was no way in, because children’s books are not suitable for adults and books written in Irish itself are no use to someone with no Irish at all.

Another of the failures in the way the language has been taught is the idea that exists now that there’s some way to sugar coat it. That people without a gift for languages will just pick it up without having to do their homework. And the problem with that is that when you don’t have a gift for language and you don’t just pick it up you then feel stupid, then frustrated, then disillusioned, and then you just abandon it altogether. I don't have a gift for languages, and this exactly how I felt about the language in school. I got through it in the end through a good memory and a certain level of pig-headedness, but the syllabus and the established practices did not cut me many breaks. Nor many others, from what I can see.

It’s much more honest to admit at the start that Irish is radically different in its structures than English, and this is an issue for learners when they’re starting out. Irish is an inflected language, which means that the forms of the words change according to what they do in a particular sentence.

Lots of languages do this, with Latin and German being the most common examples, but English and the Romance languages like French, Spanish or Italian do not inflect words any more, and that’s what makes Irish so frightening for someone who is a native speaker of English. Such as ninety plus per cent of the population of Ireland. And these constructions which you can’t relate back to English are then doubly frightening if you have a teacher blithely ignoring their existence, and then expecting someone to just somehow pick up all these subtle changes (fuinneog, an fhuinneog, fuinneoige, na fuinneoige, na fuinneoga, na bhfuinneog, for example) as he or she goes along.

Doctor Wong’s book lists the rules. How many people put down fourteen years at school without ever knowing if the Irish for Christmas is “Nollag” or “Nollaig”? And if only one of those words translates as Christmas, what in the name of God does the other one mean? Using Donna Wong’s book as a reference will tell you, and may be the first step to Irish people being able to learn your own language. Something for which the State should thank her.

But which the State almost certainly won’t, of course. It is interesting to note that Doctor Wong’s generously acknowledges her debt to Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig’s Réchúrsa Gramadaí, and pointedly notes that “if this book [Réchúrsa Gramadaí] had an English translation, A Learner’s Guide to Irish would be unnecessary.” Doctor Wong wrote her book outside the structures of the Irish language industry in this country. It’s the nation’s own fault that Irish remains on her deathbed eighty years after independence. Something to reflect on for St Patrick’s Day as we celebrate what a fine people we are.





Technorati Tags: Gaeilge, Irish, Donna Wong, A Learner's Guide to Irish

Quiet Road Girl Milk - What the Carlsberg Ad Tells Us About the State of the Irish Language

This is Seachtain na Gaeilge, that one magical week in the year when the nation’s lip service towards the First Language is extended – to about the tip of the nose and the point of the chin, as far as An Spailpín Fánach can make out.

The 2006 Census tells us that there are 53,471 people who speak Irish, daily, outside the education system, 97,089 who do so weekly, and a rather stunning 581,574 who do sometimes. Only 412,846 said they never speak Irish out of the 1,656,790 surveyed, which means, using simple arithmetic, that we have a population of one million Irish speakers in the state. One million! An Tomaltach likes to note how odd it is that, even though the Polish population here is smaller than 100,000 it is not at all uncommon to hear Polish spoken on the streets, while hearing Irish spoken in public remains a rarity. An Tomaltach doesn’t miss much.

It’s reasonably clear, therefore, that most people who claim to be Irish speakers in the census are talking through their hats, and doing so in English at that. In Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhí’s review in Foinse of the recently published “A New View of the Irish Language,” edited by Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín and Seán Ó Cearnaigh, Ó Gairbhí makes the point that if that 100,000 Irish speakers existed, there would be no point in discussing New Views of the Irish Language in a language other than Irish. His point is well made.

David McWilliams made the point in The Pope’s Children that the Gaeilscoil movement was indicative of the new role that the language will lead in the Ireland of the 21st Century, that paradise run by Hibero-whatsits, where the Budland of today is but a distressing memory. One of the signature moments of the TV show of the book of the newspaper column was McWilliams breaking into Irish himself while interviewing a rather startled Gaeilscoil principle. An Spailpín has grave doubts about the whole Gaeilscoil movement, especially in the capital; your constant quillsman simply notes how many columns McWilliams himself writes in Irish, and moves on.

The search for the true status of Irish in the nation in 2008 is a little like the search for Schrödinger’s cat. You may remember that, in creating his famous metaphor illustrating the sometimes counter-intuitive nature of quantum physics, Professor Schrödinger posited of a certain cat that may or may not be in a certain box, and the nature of the box is such that we can only tell by opening the box whether or not the cat is inside. Only thing is, opening the box offs the moggy. How then do we open the box without killing kitty? So it is with Irish; once we start asking the question people start lying to the questioner. It’s simple human nature.

Therefore, to find out the true status of the language in Ireland we have to surprise the nymph while bathing. We need to take a snapshot of the nation and the language while the nation isn’t looking, and thus find out how we really feel about the language.

And Carlsberg have done just that, with their Irish-in-the-nightclub ad that’s currently running on the telly. It isn’t so much the ad itself, but the public reaction to it, which seems – on anecdotal evidence alone – to be quite positive. We throw the shoulders back when we see it, and bask in a certain glow.

The ad, for those that haven’t see it, goes like this. Three young Irishmen are on holidays in some foreign city. They go into a nightclub, and shout three Carlsberg. The barman asks them where they are from, and they reply “Ireland.” The three boys are then asked to do something Irish – you know the way French people in bars here are always asked to do something typically French, like eating cheese or surrendering to the Germans? Or Germans are asked to invade France in the first place? Same principle.

Anyway, our three heroes put their heads together and they decide to speak Irish. So the leader turns around and says falteringly “An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas?”

His confidence builds then and he begins orating wildly to an eager crowd. “Agus madra rua. Is maith liom caca milis. Agus Sharon Ní Bheoláin! Tá geansaí orm. Tá scamall sa spéir. Tabhair dom an caca milis!”

The scene ends with our hero cutting a rug with the local talent. “Speak more Irish,” she asks him. “Ciúnas bóthar cailín bainne” he tells her, dancing away. She laughs seductively. Fade to black.

And that ad sums up everything the nation as a whole thinks about the first language right now. We like the idea of Irish, the idea of it being there, but is has no semantic meaning for us. It means nothing. Such word we have are only those we remember from school, in brief incoherent snatches. We like the language, in the same way we like that old fool of a dog that always chases parked cars, but fundamentally it’s a joke, not something to be taken seriously. “Ciúnas bóthar cailín bainne.” “Quiet road girl milk.” Gibberish. We think Irish is gibberish, and its only purpose is to give us another reason look down on foreigners, something we love doing all the time.

Somehow, eighty-seven years after independence, it doesn’t seem that much to be proud of.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Culture, Irish, Gaeilge, Seachtain na Gaeilge, Carlsberg Ad

On the Learning of Irish

You’ve bitten the bullet. You’ve seen David McWilliams flicking his fringe while talking Irish with some múinteoir gaelscoile on The Pope’s Children, and you decide that you want some of that. It’s the off-season for classes – not that they’re worth a damn anyway, on An Spailpín’s experience – so you make your way to Eason’s or Hodges Figgis and you decide you’ll buy a book, and try to tackle the ancient language of the Gael that way.

You stand at the shelf that Hodges Figgis allocate to books in Irish – not many, but still the most in the capital city of this republic – and there she is, giving you the come hither look, or, she might say herself, an cuma tar anseo, a chuisle mo chroí. It’s Sharon Ní Bheoláin, and she’s the face of Turas Teanga, RTÉ’s most recent attempt at the painless instillation of Irish into the national psyche.

You have a vague memory of the show being on, but you must have been doing something else at the time. You buy the DVD box-set for fifty lids, go home and watch the first episode. You never watch it ever again, and leave it shamefully at the back of the press, along with that interior decoration book and the The Essential Heart on CD.

Turas Teanga epitomised all that was wrong in Irish language teaching. Because there seems to be an idea abroad that the slightest suggestion that any effort on the part of the prospective students would have same prospective students fleeing the premises in the manner of several nymphs surprised while bathing, what you have instead is beautiful Sharon driving around some beautiful scenery in a beautiful open-topped car intercut with some bucks turning hay and speaking Irish in impenetrable accents. What on earth is the point?

To An Spailpín’s mind, any question of learning a language is a question of building a vocabulary and understanding grammar. An Spailpín has read of sages who can pick up languages just like that – a gift enjoyed by caddish hero of the Flashman novels, for instance – but for mortals, things don’t come that easy, and you’ve going to have to sit down with your dictionary, grammar and workbook and put in the hours. But once you’re prepared to accept that, there is hope. Of a kind.

The ace, king, queen and jack of Irish grammars is a book called Réchúrsa Gramadaí, written – or compiled, even – by Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig. It’s a beast of a grammar, and answers all the questions you could possibly have – provided you’re sufficiently fluent to read the thing, because it’s written entirely in Irish. An Spailpín remembers flicking through a copy in secondary school and when I beheld a sample Leaving Cert question from 1936, I felt as that character in Chesterton’s Lepanto, who found his God forgotten and sought no more a sign. Had I had a Bible written in the original Coptic Greek it could not have been more useless than Réchúrsa Gramadaí was to a schoolboy whose first language was English.

An Spailpín still remembers the sense of being hopelessly lost and confused between all those urús, séimhiús and I-haven’t-got-a-clues that moved in and out of the miles of non-standard prose we had to hack through in those classrooms, responding to forces of I knew not what. A voluminous memory and what I suspect was a certainly antipathy on the part of the examiners won me a C in the Honours paper, and after that year’s Matriculation it was slán leat to the Gaeilge for ever.

Returning wasn’t easy, as it’s remarkably difficult to find good books of Irish tuition. It’s been said that there are more writers of Irish than there are readers and a quick visit to the bookstore will quickly suggest that notion is based in reality. Most of the books are aimed at children, of course, because they are forced to buy the books for school. Good egg for the author, but not so much fun for an adult learner, whose interest in súgradh, milseáin and lá cois farraige has hopefully receded.

The best book of tuition in the language, in the basics of how the language works, is “Cruinnscríobh na Gaeilge,” by Ciarán Mac Murchaidh. In his introduction, Mac Murchaidh remarks that previous grammars have been a little too comprehensive, and he’s hoping to come up with a more user-friendly edition. And he succeeds admirably – working through the book I saw for the first time where all those h’s were coming from, and why they were there. I even found out what An Tuisil Ginideach was, something I honestly never knew in fourteen years of Irish in school. I tell you most solemnly, watchers of the skies with new planets swimming into their ken were only in the ha’penny place with An Spailpín Fánach.

There’s only one problem with Cruinnscríobh na Gaeilge. It’s written in Irish. Grand if you have that Gaeilge bhriste that was always considered better than Béarla cliste, but if your Irish is so rusty now that you can no longer see the metal beneath, Cruinnscíobh na Gaeilge is no good to you at all.

The Christian Brothers’ famous New Irish Grammar is a possible solution. It’s in English, and therefore accessible. It appears to be modelled on the famous Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, and it’s pretty by God comprehensive – sadists and terrorists the Brothers may have been, but they didn’t believe in phoning it in either. It is hard to imagine any question of Irish grammar that is not answered somewhere within the pages of the Christian Brothers’ New Irish Grammar.

The only problem, of course, is that while it’s all very good as a reference, trying to use the New Irish Grammar as textbook is like trying to learn a language from a dictionary. That’s just not the way languages, or human brains, work.

So it’s hats off and sound the trumpets for Ms Donna Wong. Donna, as you may have gathered from her handle, ain’t from round here. Ms Wong was studying Irish in San Francisco and now teaches it in Golden State College. As she remarked in an interview with Beo.ie last year, Ms Wong had such difficulty finding an Irish textbook in English that she wrote one herself.

A Learner’s Guide to Irish is the result, and An Spailpín Fánach heartily recommends it to anyone tackling a return to Irish. Once you begin to recognise the word mutations that are so much a part of Irish and so alien to English, the mountain will become considerably less terrifying. It still has to be climbed, but at least now you have a guide on whom you can rely. And what more can we ask for?

Of course, it’s a point of shame for the nation that this essential service, a basic textbook on the supposed first language of the State, needed a foreigner to write it and, had a foreigner not written it, would be waiting to be written yet. Were the body politic worth a damn, they’d make Ms Wong a freewoman of Dublin. Instead, they’ll probably be too busy shouldering each other out of the way trying to get into a photocall with Paul O’Connell at Croke Park.

But no matter. Irish has been for idealists for some time. If you’re looking for reward or thanks, you’ll need to look elsewhere for a hobby. But knowing some Irish does make Irish people feel more whole, or can do, certainly. If you doubt it, click on this link to Liam Ó Maonlaí singing ‘Sí Do Mhaimeo at a Fleadh a few years ago. If it means nothing, it means nothing and that’s fair enough. But if it registers at all, maybe a twenty bucks towards Donna Wong’s book wouldn’t be a bad idea as spring approaches, with its marvellous promise of growth and renewal, fás agus athbheochán.

FOCAL SCOIR: I noticed, while looking up stuff for this (because your diligent Spailpín does his homework you know), I was disappointed to discover that Réchúrsa Gramadaí is no longer in print. This is another source of national shame – even though the book may have blighted my childhood, that does not mean that it’s not very valuable. All it means is it should be kept well away from children. Like firearms or votes. I hope it’s back in print soon. For the nation’s sake.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, teaching, Gaeilge

On the Teaching of Irish

An Spailpín is interested to note Conradh na Gaeilge’s suggestions about improving the teaching of Irish in schools, as published yesterday and reported in the Irish Times this morning. The proposals are fine, as far as they go; the problem is of course that as long as the syllabus remains as misguided as it is any proposals along the lines of those of Conradh na Gaeilge’s are exercises in deck-chair re-arranging on doomed ships from the Harland and Wolff shipyard. However, to re-invent the Irish language syllabus would require things like courage, vision, commitment and logical consistency, none of which are concepts traditionally associated with Dáil Éireann or the inhabitants therein.

An Spailpín Fánach is also just rotten enough to remark that Conradh na Gaeilge might be better served attending to the problems in their own house. Your humble correspondent signed up for one of Conradh’s own classes some years ago – the ardleibhéal, no less – and the experience was a disappointing one. In fact, were it not for the fact that his friends are now insisting that your slightly bitter quillsman accentuate the positive I would posit a view that the only reason Conradh runs classes is to make easy dough, but as I say, I eliminate the negative in these things anymore and let all this little stuff go.

One of the reasons why the Conradh classes, and any other classes I’ve attended, have been wastes of time is the absence of set texts, and this asinine idea currently in vogue for the “spoken language.” What this means in effect is that teachers can just gas away for two hours and then toddle off home, happy that they’ve done their bit for the language.

Well, life isn’t that easy. Learning another language isn’t for cissies, and learning one as complicated as Irish takes a certain amount of guts. One of the reasons why Irish is so difficult is because of the mutations of the words – words change according to the grammatical function they perform in a sentence in a way that is utterly alien to English constructions. It’s quite common in Latin, but dumbing down means that we try and keep exposure to that from our children’s innocent eyes as well. We can’t risk thinking breaking out, you know.

An Spailpín Fánach’s chief memory of Irish from his schooldays – and those schooldays last fourteen long years, let’s not forget – is of Irish essays being returned with corrections in red ink that indicated h’s missing in some places and h’s to spare in others, the whole thing peppered with missing fadas, making that days pensées looking like they’d been caught in a blood-coloured blizzard. By the time the Leaving Cert rolled around, I had given up all hope of ever figuring out what went where, and I approached the upcoming examination in the same stoic manner as an infantryman going over to the top at the Somme – I knew that if I made it safely to the other side I was damned if I was ever coming back to this God-forsaken vision of Hell.

Children start learning Irish at the age of four. It’s a fifty-fifty shot if they’re even fully toilet-trained and we, in our wisdom, expect them to pick their way through a sentence as euphonically pleasing and grammatically complex as “ná bac le mac an bhacaigh agus ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat.” We are an optimistic race.

Irish grammar is complicated. Full stop. Most people’s memories of Irish at school are of being hopelessly lost in its thickets, or else of simply counting the days until the Leaving Cert when they’d never have to look at another leabhar or focal ever again. So, nice and all as it would be to think that one could just painlessly soak the language up, as porter is imbibed on Saturday night, that’s not the way the world works, and all the wishing in the world won’t make it so.

The Government, insofar as it gives the language any consideration at all, is interested only in not rocking boats – not rocking the traditional pieties about part of what we are and aren’t the Gaelscoileanna great, and not rocking the gravy trains to the Gaeltachts and subsequently losing seats in the election. After that, they couldn’t give a rooty-toot-toot.

If you do give a rooty-toot-toot, if in this age of concepts of patriotism going no further than ringing Dessie Cahill to tell him how deeply proud you are to see rugby and soccer in Croke Park, then God help you. However, An Spailpín is stricken with the same sickness, so call back in a few days to this strange space and we’ll see what we can to do to learn our language correctly. In the meantime, An Spailpín respectfully suggests to Mary Hanafin and her underlings in the Department of Education that perhaps she could take Mr David Lee Roth’s advice, and employ hotter teachers. This is the Podge and Rodge generation after all.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, teaching, Gaeilge