Taking
liberties with Marianne Faithfull’s rasped
album title, her frustrated delivery and resentful
lyrics resound with a bittersweet resonance--as
bearla about an gaeilge--throughout these
lucky thirteen contributors to Ciarán Mac
Murchaidh’s ‘Who Needs Irish?’
Reflections on the Importance of the Irish Language
Today (Dublin: Veritas, 2004. ISBN 1-85390-777-4.
14.95 euro. 192 pp.). This collection allows us,
as the anglophone majority, to listen to a debate
among those speaking our minority native language.
Repeatedly, Irish-speakers within these pages insist
that Hiberno-English, along with cultural nationalism,
cannot sustain any distinctive Irish quality for
long within our homogenising society. While critics
(as recently as Tom Paulin in his 1983 Field Day
pamphlet ‘A New Look at the Language Question’)
have asserted over the past century that blarneyising
the conqueror’s tongue could keep English green,
Mac Murchaidh’s volume presents us with the
failure of Irish as our national vernacular, with
the nearly non-existent recovery of any area by
a consistent, daily, Gaelic-using majority--even
within one area of Dublin or Belfast. My judgment
does not ignore the passion with which each contributor
argues a case for the language’s survival.
Realistically, however, they must confront a realisation
that Irish as a community language chosen by even
the small remnant in and out of na Gaeltachtaí
may vanish due not only to government malfeasance
but our own indifference to passing on this dazzlingly
expressive means of distinction. You may counter
that the death of Irish has long been loudly and
prematurely pronounced, but statistics on recent
usage within Gaeltachts offer little solace to those
optimists awaiting a mass rejection of the language
in which you and I write about the condition of
a language we barely speak. Why do these essays
appear in English? Practically, hearings on the
viability of Irish need our attention, not to be
sequestered for only judges or a few privileged
informants.
As
I noted in The Blanket
in reacting to James McCloskey’s Voices
Silenced/Guthanna in Éag, whether Irish
remains moribund, dead, or alive remains contentious;
McCloskey’s assumption that it will be within
the safe top ten percent worldwide among languages
due to its hundred thousand fluent users and government
stewardship in Mac Murchaidh’s book receives
a nod in passing but also a tilt from more than
one skeptic. In this review article, I will summarise
each of the thirteen essays, delving deeper into
many of them, as, making my way through, many volleys
ricocheted and dovetailed over its print.
Alan
Titley, when prefacing Dermot Bolger’s 1986
anthology The Bright Wave/An Tonn Gheal,
argued how Irish-speakers anticipated postmodern
ennui for centuries; the twilight bards of the 17
and 18th centuries stared down existentialism long
before Kierkegaard or Sartre. Here, Titley continues
to address Irish angst: ‘we have never resolved
our identity crisis after the retreat of the language.’
(21) He introduces a common lament from his co-respondents:
‘The final act of language change is always
the result of a long series of blows and thumps
and softenings-up. We got it in the neck so often
that the words fell out of our throats. We presumed
that the job of getting them back would be quite
easy.’ (20-21) I quote Titley twice due to
his inimitable command of both languages—he’s
a fearsomely erudite and contentious critic—and
for his pithy autopsy on the demise of the Gaelic
Revival, compulsory Irish, the malaise of the Free
State, and the hypocrisy of those working under
Dublin’s mismanagement for eighty years as
its patients flatline.
His
ironic aubade conveys the mental landscape after
the first flush of sunny triumph over the Gall
warmed enthusiasts in the 1920s and 30s towards
conversion to the Gael:
Why
did the matchmaking of the Free State fizzle into
a damp squib? Titley’s vague, but he reckons
that by WWII, the honeymoon was over. The necessary
energy needed to make the arranged marriage with
Peig and Paudeen’s offspring faded into the
reality that Mags and Pat had to get real jobs in
the city and forget rural reveries within which
too many revivalists had remained irrelevant, idiotic,
or impoverished.
Although
she makes no mention of her father, Desmond, Kate
Fennell grew up in the Conamara Gaeltacht thanks
to Desmond’s determination in the 1960s and
70s to leave Dublin and organise with the Ceárta
Síbhialta civil rights movement there.
As a republican, he helped the early Provisionals
draft the Éire Nua federal scheme,
and wrote as Freeman for An Phoblacht. He
later left the West, although his friend and fellow
agitator Bob Quinn continues to write and make films
from there. After a contentious spat with RTÉ,
Gay Byrne, and the arbiters of Dublin 4, Fennell
endures self-imposed exile in Italy. I add this
context to Kate’s account, as its quixotic
resolution repeats (sans the cisalpine retreat)
the struggles familiar to so many readers of The
Blanket, who, caught up in the possibility of change,
gave the prime of their lives to a cause that may
have now embittered many formerly true believers.
Alienation, as Kate learned, came along with an
teanga. Learning Russian and Slavic languages,
she feels more at home with their frontiers, near
the Black Sea of legendary Celtic ancestors, than
Britain or Central Europe. Like her father, she
has called many places her home, but savours her
childhood blas with its intimate delight
that English cannot replace. More emotional than
linguistically, she proclaims that the ‘sound
of Irish seems to be locked in the subconscious
mind of our people.’ (27) It beckons conversers
into a deeper affirmation of pride, of trust, and
of a common treasure, or dúchas. Intimacy
and dúchas often recur when other
contributors reply in this collection to the puzzled
query ‘Who Needs Irish?’
Kate
Fennell and the next writer, Neasa Ní Chinnéide
from Kerry’s Gaeltacht, also acknowledge
the growing barriers set up by speakers against
those who try to use Irish who are not native to
that district; she finds herself shut out of this
intimacy when visiting An Spidéal and
addressing clerks in Irish, as her shared language
retracts and bristles against invaders. Those trying
to improve their Irish, she fears, also endure snobbery
and derision from natives. I refer you to Flann
O Brien’s deflation of the gaeilgoirí
in An Beal Bocht/The Poor Mouth. Yet this
discouragement, that I too have shrunk from, pales
before the crimes committed in the name of—not
always by the—English. The mentality
of shame that tally-sticks, evictions, and stage-Paddies
today can only dimly summon scars many Irish speakers
still. Curiously, as an aside, the critical debate
over the Conamara-based plays of Martin McDonagh
roars while Micheál Ó Conghaile’s
translation of The Lonesome West into
Ualach an Uaignis (from the translator’s
quality press, Cló Iar-Chonnachta)
has received a more favourable judgment from Irish-comprehending
audiences! Returning translation out of Irish into
English backwards, for once, offers spectators a
funhouse mirror held up to life in the wild Irish
west, distorted admittedly but in this play, I agree,
tempered by poignancy and maturity. Such recoveries
of culture, of the Irish from the English, nevertheless,
appear too rarely.
More
often, the stereotypes persist of a language soiled
by poverty and passivity. Kerby Miller in his deservedly
influential 1986 study of letters home by immigrants,
Emigrants and Exiles, claims that Irish brings
with it an expression of inaction: as hunger and
sickness ‘fall upon’ a first-person speaker
using an Irish construction to say ‘I’m
ill’ or ‘I’m famished’ so, Miller
argues, this reveals a fatalistic worldview by the
native Irish. Mac Murcaidh’s contributors avoid
such Whorfian applications, but Ní Chinnéide
ponders ‘the personal consequences which, multiplied
by a lifetime’s experiences, become social
and political consequences to a people for whom
this has been a common experience’. (36) This
contraction of the public arena threatens to repel
Irish speakers into a bunker mentality. Perhaps
Miller’s theory finds another affirmation?
One dialect user may not address another by their
common tongue; the fear of the outsider outlasts
colonialism.
Those
not known to the natives will not benefit from their
Irish, and English turns into the de facto means
of communication. Those moving into these areas
without Irish may see it as an obstacle to their
English-speaking children’s school (or, I might
add, their own career) advancement. Arts and crafts
and folksy accents alone then season local flavour,
and the decline of Irish hastens. Ní Chinnéide
reminds such families that bilingualism brings ‘enhanced
linguistic competence. The choice is a highway,
not a cul-de-sac.’ (40) To keep Irish-speakers
using the language, schools and jobs need to be
given to that community, and it’s only fair
that those choosing to enter into such regions from
elsewhere realise the rationale why a Gaeltacht
has been designated and supported.
In
a December 2003 interview with the on-line Irish-language
magazine Beo, Lillis Ó Laoire spoke
of his immersion into not only his native tongue,
but also his enjoyment of the diversity of Los Angeles,
where he has been lately teaching. His restless
wander between the notes, whether from Donegal sean-nós
into Colm Ó Foghlú’s experimental
album Echoing, or from archival labors at
Limerick’s university to world music at UCLA,
reverberates in his contribution to Mac Murchaidh’s
polyphonic chorus. In a lengthy essay, Ó
Laoire reminds us that the 1926 boundaries drawn
by the new Gaeltacht Commission never excluded
those areas using some English. On an original map,
he emphasises, you can chart ‘Irish or Gaelic-speaking
people wherever they might be found. It applied
to people and to networks of communication’
before being gradually linked to regions. (47; see
also John Walsh’s recent monograph Díchoimisiúnú
Teanga: Coimisiún na Gaeltachta 1926)
Networking creates his own family’s bilingual
encounters over the past century. Native speakers
of both marry, until Ó Laoire regards his
paternal tongue as English and his maternal as Irish.
Always code-switching, to use the linguist’s
jargon, he realized from a young age in Donegal
that ‘Irish could no longer be taken for granted,
but must be nurtured and practiced and encouraged.’
(53) This element of choice needs to be stressed
for any investigator into the continuity of today’s
Irish-speaking communities.
At
an Irish Studies conference panel in Debrecen, Hungary,
last year, I asked three investigators (two of whom
appear in “Who Needs Irish?” Máirín
Nic Eoin as an author and Piaras Mac Éinri
as an example; the third, Caoimhghín Ó
Croidheáin, pursues sociolinguistic research
at DCU) about the assertion made by some linguists
that unless a language is transmitted as a ‘natural’
action to the next generation—without a conscious
decision to do so--then the language’s survival
will end. All three agreed that this assumption
did not apply to those passing on Irish to their
offspring. Since all Irish speak English, the determination
to keep Irish alive has to be made by each speaker.
No Gaeltacht can shelter monolinguals or
those complacent or naïve enough to think that
Irish carries its own momentum to spur its young
users instinctively on. Ó Laoire urges readers
to adapt the same sympathy many of us have for endangered
species into similar activism to protect and nurture
Irish back into a state of health. As McCloskey
reminded his readers, if a gap opens of only a few
years in which the spoken chain does not gain another
link, the connections sever and the language will
likely never be regained by the community as its
everyday method of communication. John Montague’s
poem ‘A Severed Tongue’ snaps a
sharp discouragement about the prognosis on surgical
re-attachment of an amputated muscle—Titley’s
epitaph on the past eight decades of state intervention
to save a gasping victim babbling as gaeilge
only encourages foreboding.
After
having passed through at UCG a period of ‘binary
thinking’ (he borrows Seamus Heaney’s
phrase) by way of Máirtin Ó Cadhain’s
Paípear Bhána agus Paípear
Bhreaca during which Ó Laoire advocated
that Irish could not progress without the regression
of English, and having described the intransigency
brought about by hard-line language nationalists
and their foes in Donegal over the past decades,
Ó Laoire hopes that the Official Languages
Act passed last year offers a fresh start for community
cooperation about the vibrancy of both state languages.
But, faced with an unofficial but pragmatically
monolingual government policy, Irish users—as
his fellow essayists often find—encounter bureaucrats
who claim Gaelicised names are ‘too much trouble’
to document: ‘Sure, isn’t it far easier
to speak English!’ (59) Subliminally and consciously,
Irish users find their efforts to keep their language
as a daily vernacular persistently undermined. If
any ideological pressure for the inclusion of Irish
now ends, so must it, Ó Laoire rejoins, for
English. Like Ní Cheinnéide, Ö
Laoire encourages support to raise Irish-speaking
families ‘in an enlightened and loving atmosphere
devoid of fear and intimidation.’ (61) McCloskey
told that California’s fifty extant Indian
languages are dying; Ó Laoire relates that
if that state can save its fifty condors from extinction,
so must we care for endangered languages in our
post-colonial world. Pitting condors against linguistic
treasures need not occur; both should be preserved.
A travel column in The Guardian I found archived
today designated Conamara’s Gaeltacht
a ‘Red Indian Reservation’ sustained only
by the natives’ connivance in finagling grants
for big bungalows from their Great Chief back East.
Such condescension, via one of Fleet Street’s
more respectable papers, conveys how Paddy, whatever
language he speaks, cannot escape the caricatures
drawn not only in tabloids.
