Muireann
Ní Mhóráin offers an exasperatedly
tragicomic riposte to the language question while
expanding upon Ó Laoire’s examples of
state annoyance towards those who expect its representatives
to provide service in its first language. Why do
clerks, she asks, suffer from an occupational disability
preventing them from pressing CTRL + ALT + vowel
for an síneadh fada, or in alphabetizing
surnames starting with Ó nó Ní?
Ní Mhóráin tires of those demanding
‘what’s that in English?’ after hearing
her name. Passersby recoil when hearing her speak
Irish to her children. She marvels at their nimble
ability to gain Irish fluency while her children’s
administrators misdiagnose their charges due to
the lack of assessment criteria for Irish-speakers.
Why not turn to the newly mandated incumbancy of
Children’s Ombudsman? Well, no Irish ability’s
needed for this post, therefore any of the rights
due children can only be asserted in the nation’s
second official language.
While
the demise of compulsory Irish receives extended
treatment in the final essay in the collection,
I interject here that many contributors reject the
equally patronising situation in current Ireland,
where lip service ventriloquises any real commitment
to speaking Irish within daily situations, at least
outside of specific Gaeltachtaí. Users
find themselves habitually shunted to the margins.
As Ó Laoire concludes, the official and practical
respect gained by those refusing to learn Irish
over the past three decades demands that those choosing
to use Irish equally deserve parity. Or more, I
advocate, given the threatened condition of the
language documented throughout these pages.
‘Outside
Northern Ireland, the political or nationalistic
motivation for speaking or writing Irish is diluting
constantly.’ (72) Again, the personal choice
of whether or not to keep using Irish becomes paramount,
within a nation increasingly leery of patriotic
appeals or weary from ideological arguments for
or against the perpetuation of the language. Éilís
Ní Dhuibhne’s autobiographical account
contrasts with Ó Laoire’s account of
growing up in Donegal. She speaks as the daughter
of one of its native speakers, but one moved to
Dublin who married a woman with no command of Irish.
Éilís’ father’s dialect
serves as her way of speaking with him, the sign
of intimacy repeated by so many of the contributors.
But, at school, Éilís learns a Kerry-Conamara
blend, so she cannot fit in with her mother, her
father, or her Ranelagh neighbours. For they see
him as a rarity: ‘a real Gaeltacht man, a carpenter
who spoke Irish because that is what his mother
spoke.’ (75) The rug-headed kerne returns to
beguile those inside the Pale. Compared with Ó
Laoire’s enshrinement of Irish as a maternal
language, Ní Dhuibhne encounters a barrier
against its use to further affection between parent
and child. The state, unwittingly in her public
education through Irish, has thwarted the manner
by which she can advance its private expression
at home.
She
emerges out of her early Irish-only schooling to
study English at UCD. Anyone with literary aspirations,
she explains, was encouraged to pursue them through
the nation’s predominant mode of publication.
With little to read in Irish as a girl, Ní
Dhuibhne recalls her alienation: ‘Irish seemed
to exist in a non-literary world. People spoke it,
taught in it, danced in it, went to clubs in it,
but they didn’t read it.’ (74) At university,
through mediaeval studies she found herself drawn
into the Irish folklore archives, but commenced
a rewarding career writing in English. Only in 1995
did she begin to create plays and, recently, novels
in Irish. The advantage of the latter language,
she tells us, rests in the ability of its audience
to allow a more experimental, folklorically dependent
story. For example, her novel The Dancers Dancing,
about a teenaged girl at an Irish college in Cork,
expanded into 2003’s Caíliní
Beaga Ghleann na mBláth. Even a quick
comparison of the two titles reveals a flight from
Yeatsian spirals towards fairytale inscapes. The
author tells how transitions between English and
Irish cultural identities can be tracked better
in the latter language, with more attention to the
wholeness rather than the separation of Ireland’s
two forms of expression. The West of her father,
the mediaeval motifs of her studies, and the urban
Dublin from where she crafts her modern narratives—they
all blend. In writing Irish, she adds, the assurance
of an audience familiar to her remains; in English,
her readers loom more anonymously.
As
with others in Mac Murchaidh’s collection,
Ní Dhuibhne continues ‘to negotiate
the borders’ of different Irish worlds. Along
with Ó Laoire, she anticipates that Irish,
within a more multicultural and linguistically diversified
setting, will remain an attractive choice. She attests
to the intimate nature of Irish over English with
a final anecdote. She wrote “Why Would Anyone
Write in Irish?” originally—if mistakenly!—as
gaeilge for this collection. Having to translate
it, she reflects upon the friendlier, cosier style
of its earlier rendition, compared against the less
formal, less colloquial form that we face here.
And, in closing, she speaks for the future, when
a girl eight or nine ‘with literary aspirations’
longing for a good read will find that pleasure
finally in a book penned in Irish.
The
next three essays wander various terrains. Prolific
poet and translator Gabriel Rosenstock seems a bit
weary of Irish between the lines of his anarchic
thoughts on its current condition. He does find
it an ideal, if not his only chosen, voice for his
muse. Along with the INNTI poets from UCC in the
1960s, he hears lyric in many tones: haiku, his
father’s German, Shakespeare, and the Beatles.
I recommend his lively primer, Beginner’s
Irish, to any learner looking for an entertaining
introduction or stimulating refresher. Lorcán
Mac Gabhainn combines a history of gaelscoileanna
with his own implementation of Gaelscoil Thaobh
na Coille in the Dublin suburb of Palmerston.
The Breton-Irish RTÉ veteran Anna Heusaff
opens up the experiences of immigrants studying
Irish. Ros na Rún, she notes, has
added a black actor, Séamas Ó Feithcheallaigh,
not as any exotic TV character, as he agrees: ‘I’m
just another Irish person, as I am in real life.’
(109) Some recently arrived African, Romanian, and
Chinese will become gaeilgoirí.
This
progress challenges the bicultural, bilingual, and
bifurcated stereotypes perpetuated by many Irish
natives. She quotes Piaras Mac Éinri, founder
of Cork’s Migration Studies Centre. Daily,
‘I come across people who can’t even be
bothered to spell my name properly. So how are they
going to show respect to more unfamiliar names from
other cultures? And therefore to the people who
carry these names?’ (110) The demands for the
Dublin government to assist its minority populations,
no longer only its gaelicised citizens, raise unfamiliar
problems. Should Gardaí if they come
from another country have to attain Irish fluency?
Must foreign-born special-education teachers learn
Irish? Contrasted with Muireann Ní Mhóraín’s
critique of the lack of Irish-fluent educational
support staff, here Heusaff presents another voice
in this multicultural and poly-linguistic debate.
Six percent of the Irish are nationals of other
countries. Familiarisation, she repeats, must occur.
She cites Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom as a short
film exposing scenarios rarely drawn before the
last decade. Ironically, she concludes that Irish-speakers
in Dublin—contrasted with Ní Mhóráin’s
shocked pedestrians overhearing her Irish-language
chats with her child—feel less conspicuous
in a city full of different sounds: Latvian, Portuguese,
French, and Russian. Whether this pan-glossian crescendo
will drown out or keep a solo performance for Irish,
on the other hand, Heusaff does not say.
