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Say it in Breac n’ English
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Seaghán Ó Murchú • September
25th 2004
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For
Northern readers of The Blanket, Pádraig
Ó Mianáin expresses Mac Éinri’s
exasperation while adding a sense of the danger
that a Corkonian will not face if speaking Irish
publicly. He moved at 15 from the Donegal Gaeltacht
to Derry city. Every time he chose Irish, he imagined
it as a V-sign flung from the fingers of an uncivilised
native. ‘Every person who speaks Irish bears
witness to the failure of centuries of cultural
cleansing by the establishment in Ireland.’
(115) Note that Britain is not mentioned; his indictment
blames those at home lording power over the defiant
before or after an imposed border. The dividing
line, as Titley and Ní Chinnéide agree,
separates stubborn neighbours as well as political
entities. Bolstering Ní Duibhne’s assertion,
Ó Mianáin claims fewer recent speakers
of Irish display it as a nationalist symbol. Its
use, he comments, has gained more acceptance among
those eager to explore the local and the regional
Ulster legacy. Unionists too can enjoy the pleasure
of its aesthetics, its encapsulation of the place
names and the heritage that all Northerners can
preserve.
The
rise of Irish as an educational medium in Belfast
presents, however, familiar difficulties. Seen by
many still as a Catholic identifier, the Irish language,
Ó Mianáin reminds us, simmers with
a stain. It’s been ‘demonised as the language
of bomb and bullet’ on a television programme
he sat in the audience for. He contends: ‘I
have no idea what percentage of those wielding guns
during the Troubles were Irish-speakers, but you
can be fairly sure that every single one of them,
republican, loyalist, police and British army alike,
was an English-speaker. Would English, then, be
more deserving of the “bomb and bullet”
mantle?’ (117) Recall debates over the Irish
signage in West Belfast, the encouragement of recognition
for Ulster Scots as its own language, and the confusion
expressed by reporters charged to repeat the Irish-language
surnames among Sinn Féin’s representatives—you
can doubtless volunteer further examples of linguistic
shibboleths.
The
author lives in Portstewart, at least 30 or 40 miles
away from another gaeilgoir family, he estimates.
Still, he’s blessed: Irish remains his language
at home (his wife too speaks it) and at work. While
acknowledging that daily life continues to goad
Irish-speakers in his town, he keeps up his side.
Here, in contrast to Heusaff’s inner-city Dublin,
‘Irish is as foreign as Greek or Spanish.’
He observes that the RUC ‘seemed to object
to my assertion that the English version of my name
is “MR Pádraig Ó Mianáin”.’
(120) He continues: ‘You take a stance when
you speak Irish here in the North, a place full
of wrong places and wrong times.’ He meets
the surliest response, however, from ‘Catholic/nationalists’
who insist on translating his name into English—recall
Ó Laoire, Ní Mhóráin,
and Ní Chinnéide’s reactions
to snubs across the border. Throughout the island,
it appears, its scornful inheritors of the native
language often persist most eagerly in diminishing
its right to exist on its own terms. The shame of
the conquered, as Titley and the Fennells remind
us, taints generations born long after 1921.
Ó
Mianáin rejects any forelock-tugging, passing
on ‘a basic right of identity’ to his
daughter. Irish predates and should outlive any
sectarian divide. He reflects--while there may be
little difference between Gaeltacht and Gealtacht
(lunacy), Irish must survive. Without it, he finishes,
it’s the difference between scéal
and scéal sceíl—the story
vs. the news secondhand, colour rather than black-and-white
reception.
Máirín
Nic Eoin listens to the stories broadcast by poets,
most notably, Donegal’s Cathal Ó Searcaigh,
which conjure up an intercultural realm where Irish
mingles with the crowd. Yet, does danger lurk if
Irish mixes too freely in the global bazaar? As
proponents of a diversified Ireland urge not only
tolerance but inclusion, does this diminish the
power of Irish itself? If it gets crushed by the
import market, would we notice or care? If the ‘creative
dynamic’—recall the energy tapped, the
messages received by Ní Dhuibhne within this
medium—sputters, then whatever Irish culture
will only be ‘mimicking the more dominant forms
of anglophone culture.’ (127) As Ní
Chinnéide reiterates, folk art and musical
whimsy cannot replace the loss of intimate communication
Irish contains.
Furthermore,
Nic Eoin cautions: ‘Losing Irish would not
merely involve the severing of a link with our cultural
past, but would also limit the possibilities for
new kinds of cultural fusion in the future.’
While she does not speculate upon what these types
of blending might produce later this century, she
introduces here a defense of Irish based not on
a backward look to it as our heritage but to its
enriching promise for Ireland’s future. Perhaps
we could paraphrase the old saw of the Revivalists:
‘Tír gan dhá teangacha; tír
gan anam.’—land without two languages,
land without a soul. Two languages at minimum, given
the multicultural conversations heard by Heusaff
in today’s Dublin.
Contrasting
Tom Paulin’s promotion of an Irish hybrid of
English as a replacement for the retirement of Irish,
and Ó Searcaigh’s enviable ability to
spin cross-cultural whirls from within his Gaeltacht
redoubt, Nic Eoin balances these polarities with
Armagh’s Aodh Ó Murchú. Responding
in a 2001 issue of Lá, he disdains
Ó Searcaigh’s cocky leap over the linguistic
fence. This, Ó Murchú objects, betrays
the vigilance a Gaeltacht poet must display.
His stance reminded me of Ó Laoire’s
admonition that Irish speakers—natives most
of all—must cherish its treasure and hand it
down intact to the next generation. By this, as
I interpret her reaction, Nic Eoin proposes neither
heirloom curator nor heritage-centre. While recognising
its hybridity and fluidity, as with any living language,
Ó Laoire and Ó Murchú’s
advice commands us to be careful with the ability
of Irish speakers to withstand the pressures that
Mac Murchaidh’s contributors document.
The
Gaeltacht’s survival no longer assured,
the fatal degree after which its submersion into
our Anglo-American multinational corporate consumer
culture can no longer keep Irish afloat cannot be
fathomed. A tidal wave of anglicisation over a century
ago, as Douglas Hyde lectured, crested over Ireland,
and this storm watch wailed when Irish-speakers
still erected a sturdier cultural bulwark than can
be excavated today. Returning to Ó Murchú,
writing from a total Galltacht that at Hyde’s
birth had still sustained a few Irish-speakers,
the Armagh poet cries out from his gaelic-rein
reich at Ó Searcaigh, one Ulsterman to another,
as the latter’s complacency stirs the former’s
unease. From Donegal, the poem’s title ‘Trasnú’
confidently saunters, ‘traversing.’ From
Armagh, the response issues: ‘Dúchas
na Cinniúna’, a death-rattle from
a ‘fateful heritage.’ As Ó Mianáin
warns, not all of their North affords safety to
an Irish-speaker.
At
her conference presentation in Hungary, Nic Eoin
recited ‘Trén bhFearann Breac,’
Colm Breathnach’s itinerary ‘through the
speckled land.’ I’m delighted that this
poem now may join the conversation held within ‘Who
Needs Irish?’ Ó Searcaigh embraces
hybridity; this Cork poet endures its imposition.
James Connolly scolded fellow rebels that if they
failed to overthrow the capitalist system, that
it mattered little if the flag turned green. Similarly,
Breathnach describes a panorama where the Irish
speaker looks about his native terrain, but where
even his native language expresses his alienation.
Breathnach
opens:
Ní
labhríonn sí a thuilleadh liom,
an aít seo,
is níl aon bhuanaíocht ag mo theanga
níos mó inti.
(Nic
Eoin translates:
She no longer speaks to me, this place,
And my language now longer finds sustenance in
her.)
His
roots now rot, too shallowly dug to gain nourishment
from shallow soil. Its surface having been salted
and ploughed sterile, starvation beckons for those
raised on an Irish native growth. The poet drifts
as a liminal wanderer, caught always between two
voices, two words, two names, two colours, two tongues.
Ó Mianáin prefers an Irish palette
of hues to a monochromatic English grey. Ó
Searcaigh presumes Irish can play unsupervised with
its new neighbours. For Breathnach, the choice of
colours dribbles to only two; the rules of the game
here represent not release but the regime.
Taím
ag taisteal trén taisteal trén bhfearann
breac
is tá dhá ainm ar gach aon bhaile
ann.
(I
am travelling through the speckled land
and every town there has two names.)
This
concept of the speckled, the half-breed, the barnbrack,
which Ó Laoire already had considered in
a brief comment on Hugo Hamilton’s unsettling
memoir of German-Gaelic-Anglophonic ‘tri-dentity’,
The Speckled People, here returns as a metaphor
for the condition of the Irish-speaker within a
post-colonial mentality that never can escape an
embattled, secondary, relegated status.
The
connotations of breac—half-a-Gaeltacht,
speckled, dappled, a loaf with raisins or fruit,
Ó Laoire meditated, showed not only Hugo
Hamilton’s childhood sense of miscegenation
or impurity, but Hamilton’s mature embrace
of the hybrid, dangling, fluid nature within which
Irish will flow alongside other streams. Ó
Laoire’s earlier influence, Spiddal-born author
and IRA Curragh inmate Máirtin Ó Cadhain,
polarised his polemic’s title, recall, as white
paper vs. ‘Páipear Bhreaca’.
While the advocacy of cultural and linguistic separatism
by republicans pulses more as an undercurrent in
Ó Mianáin’s reactions, the volume
on the whole, in my opinion, would have benefited
from an essay on the benefits and drawbacks of nationalist
promotion and commotion through Irish as a practical
or subversive means of communication. Such tensions,
after all, add to the conflicts even the very southern-bound
Breathnach’s Irish rover cannot escape.
After
listing bilingual signage of a few Irish towns,
Breathnach’s speaker faces what such signifiers
signify:
an
t-ainm dúchais
sa chló iodálach
claoninsint ar stair na báite,
an t-ainm dúchais
sa chló is lú
faoininsint ag dul ó chlos…
(the
native name
in italic print
a perverse telling of local history
the native name
in the smallest print
a faint telling becoming fainter…)
Breathnach’s
speaker listlessly reports:
‘there
are castles I will never attack
and officials before me whose pride is great
my own queen I’m afraid I will not defend
I am surrounded by footsoldiers on the road.’
While
Nic Eoin correctly stresses the personal expression
of this estrangement, I hear as well a political
statement. Cork may call itself the rebel county,
but here its Gaelic holdout deserts the rapparees.
The forces of his enemy encircle him, he rejects
loyalty to a monarch whose name remains hidden perhaps
in the legendary past, while the functionaries of
his territory’s usurper brook no refusal—so,
he shrinks from any defense of his realm. He ends
reciting a litany of the two conditions within which
he must live within a divided state, what Seamus
Heaney refers to as ‘binary thinking’.
But, writing in Irish, Breathnach expresses here
the resignation of the defeated rather than the
defiance or delight of Co Derry’s bard.
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All
censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging
current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress
is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and
executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently
the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
- George Bernard Shaw
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