Cliché:
a man on Belfast street listens to the hounds. They
find more than one ear cocked in this collection
of essays edited by Fionntán de Brún.
Loyalists fearing native incursions repeat fears
that the dogs themselves will revert to Irish, not
only their Gaelic masters. As for the non-canine
contingent, those not only native but many planted,
of course, once spoke Irish and learn it today.
This volume efficiently but thoroughly documents
the fortunes of Irish throughout Belfast's eras.
Recent
research has explored uses of Irish in the North
so that the editor's wish for 'study of census figures'
has already been undertaken. (14) Chapter 6 (pp.
134-171) of Diarmuit Mac Giolla Chríost,
in The Irish Language in Ireland (London:
Routledge, 2005), synthesises 1991 and 2001 census
data. He finds, among many intriguing details, that
females more than males identify with the language
'as part of their cultural identity'. (MGC 164)
Females with advanced technical and managerial occupations
supply many of the region's younger Irish-speakers,
the 1991 data suggested; however, 'males in particular
are over-represented in the class "No Paid
Job in Last Ten Years'".(MGC 145) Has this
situation changed in the last fifteen years?
The
final essay in this collection, Seán Mistéil's
'The Gaeltacht Quarter', affirms optimism. He envisions
how Belfast could follow William Morris' ideal to
'create commercial value from cultural wealth'.
(191) Like Temple Bar in Dublin, a district (he
does not locate where but implies West Belfast)
could by signage, cultural centres, businesses,
and schools entice and endure - Mistéil proposes
- as a magnet for Northern urban Irish speakers.
His scheme illustrates how visionary the youngest
proponents (he was born in 1964 and raised in 'Gaeltacht
Bhóthar Seoighe' his note says) have grown
- as among thousands raised in Ulster's original
language.
While
any city dweller might guess the meaning of Béal
Feirste as 'the mouth of a farset', what is a farset?
Patrick McKay explains in 'Belfast place-names and
the Irish language' how the city takes its name
not (as is often erroneously assumed) from the river
Farset under today's High Street, but from where
the river's name derives: fearsaid: sandbank
ford - that across the Lagan joining Down to Antrim.
His essay explains the townlands of Belfast. How
many readers have seen a map of these? Subsiding
under today's districts, the old - often rural -
toponyms ghost today's built environment. McKay
provides each townland's etymology and appends a
gazetteer of bilingual street names allowed under
a Local Government 1995 order. He concludes by reminding
urbanites that postal addresses now can restore
townlands as well as numbered streets. Even those
in the city may be able to add the ancient names
underlying their current residences.
Belfast
was settled by Irish speakers, but after 1603, the
Plantation drove away most of its indigenous inhabitants.
Aódan MacPóilin examines the state
of Irish up to the 18th century. Its placenames
exist as a 'palimpsest' but they were understood
by fewer locals. Still, the language kept a tenuous
hold in the countryside. First from evangelicals,
and then sponsors of the 1792 Harp Festival, Irish
recovered respect. Antiquarians feted bards. Stories
and songs were transcribed by smitten scholars.
(I note in passing that five out of these ten harpists
were blind.)
A.J.
Hughes in two lengthy essays recounts its revivalists.
Robert MacAdam-whose name graces half of the Culturlann-lived
from 1808 to 1895. That is, through the antiquarian
enthusiasm that as Romanticism restored to the European
elite's attention rural lore MacAdam was raised;
he died the year the city's Gaelic League began
amidst a second cultural revival. Both bookend the
19th century; both movements were funded and perpetuated
by the Protestant gentry. Soho Foundry's profits
allowed MacAdam his family's income to underwrote
song collection in the Glens of Antrim. James MacDonnell,
born there, was from a family who had hosted Art
O'Neill, harpist at the Festival; MacDonnell wrote
its P.R. circular. Patrick Lynch, an itinerant teacher
of Irish, tried at the 'Inst' to conduct classes;
his blurb predicted that within three or four months
fluency could be attained sufficient for a gentleman
to enter conversations with a Gaelic speaker while
finally freeing the former from worry that the latter's
employment of the ancient vernacular was a popular
subterfuge to cheat the 'quality' when transacting
business.
William Neilsen capitalised on such practicality
for learning Irish. The North's countryside could
scarcely be traversed, he reminded potential students,
without Irish; besides, this Presbyterian minister
cherished 'the beauties of one of the most expressive,
philosophically accurate, and polished languages
that has ever existed.' (qtd. 52) Hughes investigates
the eloquent champions of the 19th century language
revival. In 1830, they formed the Ulster Gaelic
Society under mainly Protestant impetus and guidance.
Enmeshed within religious battles with Catholics
over proselytising in Irish to rural folk, the revivalists
and the preachers both believed that - even as the
Famine attacked its bastions- ability in Irish remained
a necessity for educated Northerners. But after
the Gaelic League assembled its Ulster branch in
1895, such ecumenism ended. Sectarian and political
divisions segregated the learners of Irish behind
nationalist militants.
Up
until 1980, de Brún uncovers in the next
essay, descendants of native speakers of Irish on
Falls Road continued as fruit vendors - a profession
brought by their families as far back as 1856 from
Omeath, where the bardic heritage echoed from medieval
Oriel. These speakers were known in Belfast as 'Fadgies'
from the vocative mode of address: 'A Pháidí'.
In Smithfield and Marquis Street (now part of Royal
Avenue), this community linked natives with learners
such as Seán MacMaoláin; MacMaoláin
in turn led Irish's municipal revival in the mid-
20th century. Each generation, then, a few families
raised their children in Irish. His memoir, I
mBéal Feirste Domh (1942) recounts these
decades.
With
the Gaelic League, sectarianism prevented the promotion
of Irish outside of a few Catholic enclaves. In
1895, P.T. McGinley hosted the inaugural meeting
of the League in Belfast. Unionists joined. By 1912,
the IRB elbowed them out. In 1913, McGinley - as
'Cú Uladh' (Ulster's hound) - asserted: 'It
is because of the spirit of nationalism that so
many of the people of Ireland learning [sic] Irish
and having their children learn Irish. And they
have that right.' (qtd. 121) Meanwhile, 'ordinary
people are not interested in these things' - they
are not scholars, for mastering Irish proves neither
easy nor relaxing. Republicans dominated the 20th
century control of Irish. Those Protestants determined
to learn it were not welcomed by either camp. Aódan
MacPóilin in this chapter scrutinises the
survival of Belfast Irish from 1892 up to 1960.
After the statelet's establishment, ironically the
separation of the political from the cultural that
Douglas Hyde sought for Conradh na Gaeilge
reified itself in the North. After partition, under
a regime hostile to nationalism, those promulgating
Irish had to retreat towards a more idealistic rationale.
Since the recovery of a Gaelicised Ulster was impossible,
efforts to revive Irish energised these grassroots
if marginalised community-based efforts. Although
this volume distances itself from the political
realms of the language (cf. Camille O'Reilly's 1999
book [endnote]), the role played by IRA prisoners
who came out of jail able to communicate in Irish
gains attention.
I
was delighted to read more about Tarlach Ó
hUid (born in Deptford as Terence Hood) who left
Crumlin Road's confines determined not to let the
1940s anti-IRA crackdown interfere with his adventures.
Even among the ranks of notable eccentrics who as
Republican volunteers have not meekly served their
time, Ó hUid's idiosyncracies - he wrote
two memoirs in Irish - stand out. Imagine including
in War News such 'useful sentences in Irish'
as 'throw the hand grenade' and 'aim the rifle at
him.' (qtd. 133) Non-sectarian, Social Credit advocate,
English Greenshirt, briefly converted to Catholicism,
adult learner, and bomb-maker, Ó hUid perches
as a progenitor once removed of many in Belfast
who can trace their own fluency to a prison stint.
While hard to independently verify, in his account
Faoi Ghlas ('Locked', 1985) Ó hUid claims
that a Gaelic Society was started in jail in 1941
by ten men able to speak Irish; by the next year
seventy-five prisoners conversed thus; in 1945 the
fluent numbered in the hundreds.
Another
agitator, Cathal McCrystal, suffered for his non-sectarian
Gaelic leftism. MacPóilin shows how separatist
the Northern advocates could become. The Clonard
branch of the League, started in 1936, thrived so
that its members sought to create an 'English-free
zone' by 1953, inspired by activists determined
to save the Gaeltacht. Cumann Cluain Ard fought
with Comhaltas Uladh (which itself in 1926 had split
off from the League; republican Fr Lorcan Ó
Muiredhaigh proposed an independent Northern organisation,
supported by Seán MacMaoláin). This
intentional provincialism, even by those committed
to Irish, demonstrates a repeated tendency for the
Northern speakers of Irish to rally around their
surviving Donegal dialect. Northerners sought to
preserve and renew their version of the language
apart from the strong pull from the 26 Counties,
especially after 1922. Clonard's linguistic holdouts
debated those on the political front, who rose to
power by promising to aid Gaelic only to betray
their vows once elected. Trade unionist and fervent
but stubborn Catholic, McCrystal went to the USSR
in 1955 and praised the Soviet treatment of women.
Therefore he was fired from his twenty-year editorship
of An tUltach, denounced from pulpits, and
removed from Comhaltas Uladh. While he may have
exaggerated his exile, his freethinking showed the
risks courted by those who opposed clerical and
political pieties. In later years, another tongue
also tempted his allegiance: he conspicuously would
sit in his pew at Sunday mass- brandishing a Russian-language
missal.
Gabrielle
Nic Uighir (as Maguire) in 1991 published Our
own language, the first academic study of West
Belfast's linguistic struggles for legitimacy during
the Troubles. She surveys the Shaw's Road Gaeltacht,
started in the mid-60s by half a dozen families.
Now, it reigns as the largest urban community of
Irish speakers; its pioneering dynamism, however,
has not spurred settlement of Irish speakers over
the rest of the city or the North. West Belfast
spins centifugal rather than centripetal force when
the energy of Irish is measured. This may account
for Seán Mistéil's supposition that
any future Gaeltacht must build upon that already
formed into An Bhóthar Seoighe, with its
infrastructure of schools, housing, committed families
determined to nourish anew a nursery and a garden
for Irish in the 21st century city.
Yet,
can such a seed truly flourish in a soil still inhospitable
to many Protestants who wish to learn Irish? Gordon
McCoy presents bluntly exclusive reality vs. inclusive
rhetoric. Republican Movement chauvinism - the Cause
glowers over the language revival to fend off other
suitors - repels many potential students across
sectarian and neighborhood divides in Belfast. McCoy
observes: 'During the conflict Irish speakers appeared
more strident in Irish and more conciliatory in
English.' (151) I add an addendum in support of
McCoy's claim: in the 2001 guide Fáilte
Feirste Thiar/ Welcome to West Belfast, 'nationalist
murals' described on p. 24 pose a markedly more
revolutionary attitude in detailed Irish, compared
to prim English terseness..
McCoy offers quotes from interviews with young Protestants,
testimonies from learners, motivations that tempted
learners, fears that learners evoked from nationalists
and loyalists, and a century of Protestant linguistic
intersections at 'sectarian interfaces'. His essay,
disturbing in this mild-mannered collection, defies
the barrier behind the bunting. Ultach Trust works
to bridge the perceived gap between Gaelic Irish
and Ulster Scots pride. UVF and Red Hand Commandoes
have incorporated Irish language phrases into iconography;
some Loyalist prisoners have learned a bit of Irish
in prison. RUC and PSNI recruits likewise have studied
Irish. But these efforts meet with suspicion from
both sides. Nationalists, McCoy concludes, gain
positive attributions by their ties to the Irish
language; loyalist learners receive negative reactions.
Few
Protestants learn Irish in local school, despite
the efforts of activists; Irish-medium education,
as Seán MacCorraidh reveals - although he
avoids any mention of sectarianism - thrives within
Catholic Belfast's enclaves. Still, he notes the
early example of Cumann Cluain Ard in attracting
learners from throughout the city; more study of
the cross-community nature of those educated through
Irish would have been welcome in his short essay
that blends his own experience as a teacher with
a statistical summary of nursery, primary, and secondary
enrollments. Community support, as Nic Uighir also
finds, invites families with passive, limited, or
no knowledge of Irish slowly into the vision that
those more adept have framed; this blend of learners
at young ages with their parents at all levels of
fluency provides a generous opportunity.
Finally,
we edge back near where we started, with Mistéil's
hope of a Gaeltacht that prospers not only within
homes and schools but in public, as visual as well
as verbal expression. Fulfillment of this dream
generated by Mistéil and his peers - as the
first generation substantially raised bilingually
and educated in Irish - demands a third revival.
One shortcoming of this book: it neglects any mention
of Belfast's most prominent writer, one raised solely
in Irish, as he claims, until the age of ten. Ciarán
Carson, poet in verse and prose in English, translator
of Irish among other tongues, merits mention as
one who, a decade before Shaw's Road, blazed a lonely
path until recently rarely roamed within Belfast
- many more follow his direction now. These Irish
speakers circle the city back to its mediaeval nomenclature
and out to its most cosmopolitan visionaries, a
trail that tracks its course not by intervening
English but spirals of indigenous Irish.
Camille O'Reilly, The Irish language
in Northern Ireland: the politics of culture
and identity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan,
1999). A notable omission from works cited by the
collective contributors: Lisa Goldenberg's M.A.
thesis, published as: The Symbolic Significance
of the Irish Language in the Northern Ireland Conflict
(Dublin: Columba P, 2003). For a comparison by a
Derry city native speaker (born in the Donegal Gaeltacht):
Pádraig Ó Mianáin, 'Passing
the Torch to the Next Generation.' In Ciarán
MacMurchaidh, ed. 'Who Needs Irish?' Reflections
on the Importance of the Irish Language Today.
(Dublin: Veritas, 2003) Pp. 113-122.
