As
stated earlier, Coimisiún na Gaeltachta
in 1926 delineated boundaries but always within
‘a countrywide bilingual continuum’ of
the language’s use. (135) Nic Eoin contends
that the reality of bringing back Irish reveals
‘contact-induced change’ that writers
have only recently dared to include. ‘Few have
dared to publish the kinds of bilingual work which
a truly realist depiction of most Irish-speaking
communities would demand.’ (136) Too often,
perhaps without awareness or intention, Irish-language
fiction, she implies, adopts a subservient stance
as its speakers kow-tow to the dominant power—a
posture more easily avoided in autobiographical
memoirs or lyric poetry. Here I interject that the
bilingualism within Conamara-based fiction of Joe
Steve Ó Neachtain or the drama from Antoine
Ó Flatharta serves as evidence that recent
authors have begun to dare to tell it as they hear
it. Purists be damned, the standards may decline,
but this, as Nic Eoin reminds us, is part of the
legacy left by a nation attempting to reclaim as
well as preserve Irish. Such hybrids, she elaborates
in a forthcoming book from Cois Life, ‘Trén
bhFearann Breac’: An Diláithriú
Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge,
offer a ‘creative potential’ within the
language that has been overlooked by many ‘Irish/postcolonial
critics.’ (Letter to this author, 28/9/04)
Engagement with society through the medium of and
media in Irish remain crucial for the language’s
success; not only Blasket recollections or verses
eulogising sunsets should supply its themes. If
we leave Irish only to the poets, I wonder, will
it be any more relevant than this snippet from James
Joyce’s story ‘Grace’? ‘—I
remember reading, said Mr Cunningham, that one of
Pope Leo’s poems was on the invention of the
photograph—in Latin, of course.’ Marvellous
as the poetic legacy serves to stimulate Irish-language
efforts, if we coddle an teanga as a hothouse
flower to be cultivated within a protected sanctuary,
then it may find itself following the fate of Latin
into the academy away from the streets. True, Irish
may attract the cognoscenti, but it will have died
as a vernacular.
Even
if the Revival had succeeded, the Irish spoken would
not have earned its learners many fáinní.
Nic Eoin quotes James McCloskey’s comment that
I summarised in my review of his book for The
Blanket: Irish would’ve been creolised
anyway. Its interlingual forms, such as Gaelscoilis
and Irish as a Second Language (or, I interrupt,
Jailic—see Peadar Ó Sioradáin’s
1991 Dialann Ocrais/Diary of a Hunger Striker
for a dramatisation through this northerly construct),
Nic Eoin explains, determine the continued evolution
Irish cannot evade. In the shadow of English, all
who speak Irish—as Ó Laoire asserts—also
know English, but they choose to advance the subject
language.
Languages
progress, but what if they end? While McCloskey
canonises Irish in the elite category of the saved,
Breandán Ó Doibhlin treats the confessions
of its faithful remnant more agnostically. For many
within contemporary Ireland, the native language
lingers as only an embarrassment. ‘There it
is like some toothless grandmother huddled by our
hearth, mumbling over some days of misery or ancient
heroism that we, our forward-looking children, have
never known and would sooner forget.’ The author
extends his analogy.
‘We
can’t in all decency throw her out—she
is after all of our blood—but we can park her
in a geriatric ghetto where she can expire in comfort
and solitude, while we get on with the business
of living.’ I recall the contempt paid Peig
Sayer’s recollections by millions of schoolchildren!
Still, like the texts assigned that summon up Ireland’s
past glories for a de-gaelicised present, the old
woman won’t go away, you know. Neither does
our inherited guilt. I learned from one 2004 guidebook
that despite the tumult of modern-day Ireland, a
distinguishing feature remains an unfailing respect
paid elders by its youth. ‘So we have given
her government commissions to revive her, Gaeltacht
grants and schemes to build up her resistance, even
her own television service to cheer her last lucid
hours.’ (145) My favourite entertainment via
TG4 was on a lonely night in a tatty b&b on
Gardiner Street when I marvelled at, over the omnipresent
hum of traffic and shouts from the street, a decidedly
homophobic and chauvinist Hong Kong martial-arts
comedy, a gender-twisting ‘Pantywaist Heroes,’
with commercials in Irish and subtitles in English,
but I suppose this would be aired towards the Dublin
enjoyed by myself and Heusaff, not the granny’s
oul’ thatched cabeen.
Why
that astonishingly multicultural, certainly post-colonial,
programme aired on TG4 raises further concerns.
Filling the state’s Irish-language channel
with decidedly non-Irish offerings attests to the
difficulty of meeting the ideal of an Irish-language
medium through which to show its media. This collection
does overlook the establishment of recent presses
such as Cois Life, the energy between music and
language, and any evidence of filmmaking. Therefore,
Msgr Ó Doibhlin’s remonstrance that
other European minorities have ignited their cultural
resurgences while Ireland’s rejuvenation slumps
sluggishly may surprise those insisting on a new
burst of interest in the language among the young.
I support his contention that many Irish should
be ashamed of their lassitude compared to their
Welsh cousins--who can boast not only of poets but
popstars in their native language. He argues that
a real revival must be a ‘moral desideratum’.
(152) As with Kate Fennell, he too rejects the earlier
Revival’s expectation that a Hiberno-English
construct could replace the intimacy of Gaelic.
Ireland’s need for continuity, he concludes,
demands control over its own tradition, without
relying on ‘essentialist or exclusivist dogmatic
statements on the true nature of Irish identity.’
(157) Here we can see how the caution of Ó
Laoire and the frustration of Breathnach segue into
the optimism of Heusaff and Ní Chinnéide.
All reject any false consciousness that only
Gaeltacht natives or Gaelic-surnamed, O-positive
redheads can assert themselves through Irish. The
freedom that any of its citizens can obtain from
a nation that lives up to its proclamation of ‘cherishing
all the children of the nation equally’ must
be, in a true Republic, given equally to its minorities
as well as us, its English-dominant majority.
This
idealism sparked by the Rising, as Titley observed
at the start of Mac Murchaidh’s collection,
resulted in an intense peak of enthusiasm followed
by, as in many couplings initiated by leaps of passion,
a slow slouch back into lazy habits. Donncha Ó
hÉallaithe analyses the rocky course of Irish-language
relationships under English-dominant supervision.
Notably, he devotes considerable attention to the
Language Freedom Movement’s campaign against
‘Compulsory Irish’. For more on the heyday
of this policy, see Adrian Kelly’s recent study.)
By the 1960s, Ó hÉallaithe explains,
pro-Irish organisations remained unable to surrender
their utopian ideal of a reclaimed Republic conducted
through a reclaimed vernacular. The Dublin government,
by the 1970s, abandoned any effort to rebuild a
free and Gaelic entity. Instead of a regime demanding
that all learn Irish, in today’s Ireland, nobody
needs to know it. Ní Mhóráin
and Heusaff have testified for each side of this
debate. Three decades after the LFM victory, finding
‘significant people who can offer a service
to Irish speakers is now governed by the laws of
probability rather than recruitment criteria.’
(170) Does this random attention to the government’s
practical enforcement of its theoretically first
language confirm the triumph of a mature, multicultural,
integrated nation? Or does it chart a regression
from the advance of its 1916 founders to a trap--Connolly’s
portent of a green flag but the same dull hegemony
over the Irish people by their own opportunist,
collaborative leaders?
By
2001, Ó hÉallaithe argues, a citizen
could not conduct business with this Irish Republic’s
heirs in the language of Irish without taking legal
action to pursue this right. Echoes, I hear, of
Pearse’s one and only court case, ninety years
ago, representing the Donegal farmer who drew prosecution
for painting his Irish name on his cart. The Crown
upends into an Taoiseach, but despite the
inversion, the socialist revolution spun only into
inertia. Unable to levitate the masses, the state
could not compel enough of its liberated millions
to freely return to their purportedly or tangibly
Gaelic regimens. Economic and political turmoil
sapped the people’s patience. Failed Gaeltacht
interventions left many native speakers complacent,
content to talk to their children and conduct in
public their business in English, leaving teachers
to pass on Irish to their next generation. While
factories appeared in these areas, they lacked sufficiently
trained local workers, and so English-speaking citizens
and foreign nationals have filled many jobs.
Failing
to monitor and resolve such situations, the state’s
mainly to blame for the geographical demise of Irish,
Ó hÉallaithe contends. Citing recent
census figures, the only hope he uncovers lies in
a slight increase in speakers through four-years-old.
He credits enrollments at gaelscoileanna
after 1996. In na Gaeltachtaí only
20,000 still use Irish as a dominant medium at home
and in the community. Northwest Donegal, from where
Ó Searcaigh, Ó Laoire, Ó Mianían,
and the father of Ní Dhuibhne originate,
remains a bastion, especially in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore).
Along Conamara’s Cois Fharraige, the strip
west from An Spidéal to Carna continues,
along with the Aran Islands and Iarthar Dhuibhneach
(Dingle). Other breac-Ghaeltachtaí survive,
reifications of Colm Breathnach’s speckled
landscapes of Cork. Even in the more secure holdouts—80%
of speakers comprising fíor-Ghaeltachtaí--as
Ó Laoire warned, Ó hÉallaithe
finds the balance for Irish at risk.
So,
at the end of this small but concentrated collection
of reflections, should we consign Irish to archivists?
Ó hÉallaithe tallies the checklist
in favour of keeping the curators at bay. TG4 and
RnG; the Official Languages Act; gaelscoileanna
agus gael choláistí; Foinse, Lá,
agus An Chultúrlann i mBéal Feirste
Thiar; NUIG, GMIT, DCU’s degrees through
Irish, in both liberal arts and technical fields;
the thriving pride in the Gaeltacht and the
renewed confidence of a multicultural Ireland. Now,
the debit column: use of Irish outside the designated
areas never has been regained, with the one exception
of the Rath Cairn district in Westmeath, legacy
of resettlement of Conamara emigrants by the Free
State—and this area, established in 1935, battled
for recognition as a Gaeltacht until it succeeded--in
1967. Desmond Fennell lamented two years later that
not even a street in Galway had won a conversion
back by a majority of its dwellers to return to
using Irish as the dominant language. (192, n. 43)
And Galway and the Gaeltacht were, at least
in 1969, still neighbours. Now, the frontier appears
to have receded back to Spiddal. I remind you that
a fit walker from Eyre Square can be ‘ag
trasnú’ (in less time than the length
of a movie) across the official boundary of Cois
Fharraige at Barna. Its designated limit when I
travelled past this summer had been, however, whitewashed
as one left Salthill’s neon lights to brave
McDonagh’s wild lonesome west.
If
the British had taken eighty years to grant legal
rights to Irish speakers, we might be outraged;
for an Irish Republic to dawdle until the Official
Languages Act to do so roused, contrarily, little
attention from the silent and indifferent majority.
Perhaps we need to forget whether the language can
be restored or revived, Ó Dobhain and Ó
hÉallaithe concur. The latter author repeats
Irish-Irelander D.P. Moran’s warning: ‘An
infallible way to paralyse people is to aim at a
utopia.’ (181) For the Dutch and the Danish,
for example, a national language persists comfortably
alongside a multilingual embrace of more dominant
European languages. Why Ireland refused this compromise
puzzles me, but like so many other conundrums, I
suppose we can blame it on England.
Yet
the necessity for intensive care of Irish demands
immediate treatment. Too many decades of abuse,
incantations, fumbled operations, and now neglect
have passed since Hyde and Conradh na Gaeilge
first raised the alarm. As Lillis Ó Laoire,
writing from California, suggested, viewing Irish
as an endangered life-form deserving respect and
protection should disturb nobody in our ecologically
sensitive society. As we set aside reserves for
condors, why not for Irish-speakers? Does this contradict
my earlier rejection of tending to Irish as a hothouse
flower, if not Ó Doibhlin’s gawping
hag? Irish like any language demands to be respected
as a means of communication outside of the museum
or vault. I have presented the findings of its practitioners
amateur and scholar. They unanimously agree: Irish
must continue in the home and the community. Even
if only twenty thousand currently practice this
within na Gaeltachtaí, this core keeps
the fruit from rotting. It’s up to the rest
of Ireland, regardless of lineage, to choose without
coercion whether or not to opt for its use as a
second language, given the evident collapse of any
hopes for its resuscitation as the national vernacular.
We’re debating it in English.
Irish-language
conservation does not demand a hell-or-Connaught,
back to the reservation, crudity. Bringing in the
wider nation, we should end debates as to whether
(as I mentioned in my review article on James McCloskey’s
appeal to preserve threatened languages) a new estate
in Spiddal may require that its eighteen households
use Irish. We would not spread salt on a field.
Mac Murcaidh’s essayists may have been made
stronger by the poison that hasn’t killed Irish.
But none should import weedkillers to eradicate
whatever Gaelic outcrops survive. Why, then, do
so many protest the nourishing of a native species—and
one we can all adapt into, for any of us can learn
Irish—to continue to flourish and propagate?
The core can live, the fruit can blossom, and we
can make it into barnbrack, the bhreac-bread,
the speckled loaf. Later, we may learn how to graft
the branch and grow our own fruit from the core.
Adapting another sapling does not mean we let the
older tree wither. Both Irish and English can thrive
in our own gardens, rural or sub/urban. English,
the preferred import, takes root and soars. Rightfully,
Irish too gains pride of place in its native soil.
Let’s perpetuate its own irreplaceable contribution
to the diversity in whose promotion and acceptance
we celebrate our contemporary Ireland.
[Author’s
note: portions will be revised thoroughly and made
less chatty while much more impersonal for inclusion
in the Irish Literary Supplement 18:2 (Spring 2005).
I thank Dr Maírín Nic Eoin for her
cogent criticism and corrections made upon my examination
of her contribution to Mac Murchaidh in a draft
of this review article.]
