Is
Irish dead, moribund, or alive? James McCloskey,
a linguist at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, tackles this question in his bilingual book,
Guthanna in Éag: An Mairfidh an Ghaeilge
Beo?/Voices Silenced? Has Irish a Future? (Baile
Átha Cliath/Dublin: Cois Life Teoranta, 2001.
5.99 pounds/7.60 euro. ISBN 1-901176-24-X). I found
his musings far too rambling—even within the
small scope of 51 pages in either language—around
the world rather than addressing Irish itself. His
title misleads: only chapter six and an epilogue
focus upon Gaeilge. Yet, this intercontinental context
has too often been neglected when addressing Ireland’s
language question, and his counter-parochialism
exemplifies how contemporary linguists can apply
issues of language death, transmission, and recovery
learned over the past century—often after the
Gaelic Revival—as anthropologists, missionaries,
professors, and activists began to encounter many
more of the approximately 6,800 languages still
surviving the century after the founding of Conradh
na Gaeilge. Yet, half of the world’s languages
will not survive this century, experts predict.
In expanding and resisting imperialism, strategies
of how people encode a wealth of meaning within
a particular means of expressing their worldview
in a microcosmic means of preservation and progression.
Far
too often, McCloskey warns us, these specific structures
by which a people conveys its understanding of their—and
our—world can collapse suddenly. ‘All
that is required is one short period of inattention
or complacency or deliberation, and the community
can find itself with a generation of children none
of whom speak the older community language. With
that single break in the chain of generational transmission,
language and all that goes with it, becomes a walking
ghost.’ (39) For many, Irish and otherwise,
a whiff or romanticism clings to the notion that
one language deserves special recognition. Consider
the furor over the recent proposal that a new housing
development in An Spideal give preference in its
18 units to Gaelic speakers. Placed against the
context of losing so many more areas of the Cois
Fharraige gaeltacht to the influx of holiday-home
buyers, the suburbanisation of Barna just west of
Galway city, and the relentless struggle to keep
Irish as a community language despite hundreds of
years of anglicisation, the preference attempted
by the Spiddal subdivision to me seems far too little.
I recall a currently in-print guidebook writer who
pointed out enviously in the Connemara section how
many of the houses admired by the visitor would
have been built with the largesse of a government
foolish enough (so the implication went) to lavish
funds upon wealthy residents in turn hoodwinking
bureaucrats by keeping up the impression that the
folk of Carna and Camus were native Irish speakers.
Looking
at the maps on http://www.gaelsaoire.ie
you many think the guidebook’s bias might not
be very inaccurate after all. Estimates bandied
about this year suggest that only about 30,000 out
of the supposedly 90,000 counted in na gaeltachtaí
are actually fluent. Many parents still insist that
their children learn English to the neglect of Irish,
bolstering McCloskey’s claim about how quickly
“walking ghosts” can be summoned. Looking
for recordings in Roundstone of a sean-nós
pair of women singers I had heard on RnG, the youngish
clerk chatted with me about how that area of the
coast—still marked on newer maps as part of
the Conamara Gaeltacht—had lost the Irish,
and the tongue was only to be spoken down by Carna,
Carraroe, and nearer the Cashel RnG station. Travelling
from my mother’s native Salthill towards the
next town of Barna, I noticed that the sign signaling
entrance into the gaeltacht had been whitewashed
over. I wondered: was this, like the arrival of
a Curves women’s gym franchise into the rapidly
constructing town, a portent of the collapse of
which McCloskey describes, or an ironic comment
painted by rebel natives that the frontier of Conamara’s
historically Irish-speaking coastal strands had
no longer deserved the designation of a reservation?
McCloskey,
speaking of what often the modern world does to
natives, tells poignant anecdotes about the ongoing
extinction of California’s Indian languages,
once numbering in the hundreds. He mentions that
younger folks wish to regain the language soon after
the last fluent elders have died. It reminded me
of Manx and Cornish today, the efforts of revivalists
to continue—as with Manx so with some of the
Indian tongues, newer learners trying to hear the
ghosts speaking from the taped archives of the dying
old ones. Practicality often determines the fate
of the minority languages’ decline; the author
counters this assumption, encountered in Ireland
for much of our history, that English brings with
it the jobs, the security, and the necessity Irish,
in its tales of poverty, cows, and decline, never
will.
He
points out that for a newer generation raised with
the gay poetry of Cathal Ó Searcaigh, the
eroticism of the woman writing as ‘Biddy Jenkinson,’
and—I add—the eclectic music of Dublin’s
Kíla or the updating of native vocal stylings
by Inis Oírr’s Lasairfhíona Ní
Chonaola, the concept of Irish as backward needs
serious revision. The stereotypes afforded Irish:
the Brothers beat it into me, they taught it worse
than French, I studied ten years and cannot ask
you the time in it—these I trust will fade
as the coercion that darkened the Dublin government’s
attempt to revive the language by the means it inherited
from the colonial British: to hammer a language
into its subjects gives way to the creation of Belfast
and Dublin urban enclaves of Irish speakers. McCloskey
reflects that the process of creolisation common
whenever two or more languages collide under cultural
and class pressure and the necessity to create a
hybrid way to communicate may also colour whatever
version of Irish survives outside the Gaeltacht.
The
author also notes that the construction of urban
areas where the language can thrive has offset the
decline in the native areas, so that numbers of
those actively using Irish have remained consistent.
Music and literature incorporating Irish and other
influences may dismay purists, but consider how
the bouzouki has invigorated traditional tunes,
and how writers like Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, Antoine
Ó Flatharta, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain,
and Ré Ó Laighléis accurately
capture the mix of English into Irish in their drama
and novels.
As
McCloskey observes, this may be a far cry from an-Athair
Peadar Ó Laoghaire, but I recall that the
priest—as part of his nationalist activism—learned
Irish to better inspire his fellow citizens to regain
a pride in their present by reading material suited
to their own conditions—late nineteenth century—by
giving them his novels and his autobiography, which
themselves had to leap out of dialectal obscurity
to assist the majority—then as now—who
needed help to learn, re-learn, or hold on to Gaeilge.
The new hybrids, McCloskey informs us, are part
of an inevitable maturity of Irish, not a sign of
its decay. I’m leafing through Dialann Ocrais:
Diary of a Hunger Strike, published in 1991
in Andytown by Foilsiú Feirste—a play
in Irish but plenty of Bearla by Peadar Ó
Sioradáin.
It
shows, of course, an element McCloskey elides over
in his short study. Irish has been, like many ways
of expression, derided and destroyed due to its
rebel stance. It refuses to buckle despite the unrelenting
homogenization that pushes against any who stand
up or stand out. This drama, too, perhaps more vividly
for many Blanket readers than tales of Cois
Fharraige, conveys McCloskey’s ultimate message
of defiance and hope for Irish. He admits that for
the next century the language is in the top 10%
of “safe” languages. Why? It’s spoken
by more than 100,000; it has the support of a nation-state.
We may scoff at the latter measure of security,
but we must admit that many within the past century
have followed Fr. Peadar, Dr. Hyde, and all the
rest who found an answer to the man who challenged
Pearse when he came to his adopted Ros Muc cabin
and proselytised among the natives that they should
preserve their language. ‘What good’s
Irish beyond the “burnt house?’’’
(An teach dóite=Maam Cross: the eastern
limit of their Conamara Gaeltacht) one challenged
the Dublin blow-in. Republicans, a few loyalists,
and nationalists of all shades in-between have responded
to the native’s challenge (or, in trendier
colonial studies jargon, “the subaltern talks
back”).
Like
McCloskey, I too find causes for inspiration. Oideas
Gael—full of wonderful cultural, language,
and musical programs each summer in Donegal’s
Glencolumbkille represents a late-flowering bloom
of the co-operative movement prepared by Fr McDyer
to save his community half-a-century ago. Foghlaim
on the county’s Arranmore island also symbolises
a district’s determination to share its heritage
with others and to ensure employment for its nourishers.
Litriocht sells Irish books on-line from
this same locale. Conamara continues to lose jobs
to global competition in its local fishing and farming,
while globalisation in turn opens up its districts
to incomers who often place learning Irish low on
their practical priorities, further weakening Irish
as a community language. Schools and parishes decline
in these rural areas; emigration may not be as far
away as before, but the magnetic pull of the housing
estates to those unhappy or unable to continue a
rural level of sustenance keeps the towns booming
and the villages declining.
On
the other hand, urban gaelscoileanna attest
to the power placed in the future by parents, often
with little or no Irish themselves, who wish to
revive the language which in so many of our cases
had been—as the author cautions—a chain
so easily broken by our past generations, willingly
or not. The shift from rural to urban, so much a
part of the last century and so much a cause of
language death, presents linguists with, McCloskey
concludes, a surprising exception. Irish, contrary
to rumors, survives as a means of inquiry into technical
fields (witness what you can learn at NUI Galway
in it), a way for Internet users to chat, a boon
for learners needing sophisticated software (look
up GaelTalk), a fascination for curious non-Gael
enthusiasts, and a reason for publishers Cois Life/The
Liffey Press to print McCloskey’s bilingual
ideas--sent 6000 miles away.
The
diaspora--long belittled by more-national-than-thou
fanatics in republicanism, the language movement,
and the supposed know-it-alls as a realm of green-beer
gullible tourists, foolishly returned Yanks, and
barstool revolutionaries--turns out in the case
of the native tongue and theoretically first language
of the lower 26 as a repository of the faithful.
Those who choose to learn Irish, who have not been
forced to endure it at too early an age, may never
gain the fluency or ease granted often to those
raised with it. But it’s time that we all recognise
that for Irish to flourish, all of our efforts deserve
respect.
