Naomi O’Leary
Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
Joe Heaney
[Partly unintelligible clip of storyteller Joe Heaney speaking Irish in New York, 1970s: “… in a chonaí san áit fada ó shin … Tadhg na Buile … ‘is cêard a bhí ann … ]
Joe Heaney
[Clip of Joe Heaney singing Sean Nós style]
Naomi O’Leary
Welcome back to the Irish Passport with me, Naomi O’Leary
Tim McInerney
And me, Tim Mc McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary
And today we’re gonna be talking all about the Irish language, which you just heard there a moment ago.
Tim McInerney
But before we get onto that, let’s take a quick look at some of your e-mails about last week’s special episode and our previous episode on the Irish border.
Naomi O’Leary
We were really bowled over by the great positive feedback that you sent us last week, so a big thank you to all our listeners who took the time to get in touch.
Tim McInerney
Absolutely. Podcasting is pretty new to us and we’re learning new things every week, so your feedback is really helpful and really appreciated. So please keep it coming.
Naomi O’Leary
Yup. And please do rate us and review us on SoundCloud, Facebook or iTunes as well and invite your friends because it makes a huge difference to get the word out. OK, Tim. I think this first question is for you. It’s from Robert in London. He said, “As a politics graduate, I found the podcast interesting and educational.” Thanks, guys. Thanks, Robert. OK. And then he says, “I hope you can explore the Scots Irish thing a bit more. And how it ties in with Celtic/Rangers culture in Scotland. Something I’ve always wondered about.”
Tim McInerney
Let’s see. So the DUP who we talked about in our last special episode are a pro-British Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. Many in this community — I mean, I stress, of course, this is not true of everyone in the Protestant community by any means — but many would not describe themselves as Irish at all. So, instead, a lot of unionists will actually describe themselves as Scotch Irish or Ulster Scots, which they understand as being a British identity. So it’s basically an ethno-cultural descriptor. I would guess, I suppose that most of the DUP see themselves as belonging to this group. Ian Paisley, for instance, he’s the guy who founded the DUP, he was always adamant that he was not Irish. He called himself Scots-Irish and for him that meant he was British.
Naomi O’Leary
Right. But hang on, Tim, why Scots Irish. What’s the link with Scotland?
Naomi O’Leary
Right. Yeah. That’s another good question. So, well, a lot of the original British colonists in Northern Ireland actually came over from Scotland. And we also have to remember that Northern Ireland is actually super close to Scotland physically, like you can actually see Scotland across the sea on a sunny day. Still to this day, the unionist community and indeed the national community have close ties to Scotland. Lots of people go back and forth from Northern Ireland to Scotland all the time.
Naomi O’Leary
Yes. It was interesting, actually, that one of the loyalists who I spoke to at that march in last week’s episode had a distinct Glaswegian accent.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, sure.
Naomi O’Leary
There are, of course, Orange Order lodges in Scotland as well. Okay and that brings us onto to Celtic and Rangers. So these are these two major football teams, that’s football as in soccer, that are based in Scotland.
Tim McInerney
Right. So this is where it gets a little bit more messy. I’m sorry.
Naomi O’Leary
Go on, Tim.
Tim McInerney
OK.
Naomi O’Leary
Give us the lowdown.
Tim McInerney
OK, so stay with me, right. So you have this deep cultural link between Protestants in Scotland and Protestants in Northern Ireland who considered themselves like first cousins, okay?
Naomi O’Leary
OK.
Naomi O’Leary
And the Protestants in Northern Ireland spend centuries in various conflicts with the Irish nationalists on the rest of the island, who see them as occupiers, okay?
Naomi O’Leary
OK.
Tim McInerney
Alright. But then in the 19th century, when Ireland was hit by the Great Famine, a whole raft of Catholic Irish emigrants started flooding from the nationalist parts of Ireland into Scotland looking for work. This is because Scotland is so physically close to Ireland. A lot of them ended up in Glasgow.
Naomi O’Leary
Oh, right. So this whole Northern Irish cultural distinction and conflict was exported en masse to Glasgow.
Tim McInerney
So as strange as it might sound, violence erupts from time to time in Scotland between Irish nationalists and British unionists. The violence has been particularly centred around two football teams that the Glasgow Celtics, which are seen as representatives of Irish nationalists and the Glasgow Rangers, which represent unionism and, I suppose, one of the reasons for this is that you get to wear your politics on your sleeve, quite literally. If you’re wearing a jersey or a uniform or a signifier of one of these teams, everyone knows which side of the conflict you’re on.
Naomi O’Leary
That was quite a long answer, but I hope that it clarifies everything for Robert in London. And thanks so much for your query.
Tim McInerney
OK. Alright. So, Naomi, I’ve picked out a question for you, too. This one comes in by email from John in Belfast. And he asked why we didn’t focus more on the fact that Northern Ireland’s regional ruling assembly is collapsed and has been since January.
Naomi O’Leary
OK. Yes, this is something that we should definitely focus on and it’s pretty relevant to today’s podcast as well. So the devolved government in Northern Ireland, which is called Stormont, is one of the institutions that was set up to bring peace to Northern Ireland. And it can legislate, to a certain extent, on matters like health and education and so on, but not on things like defence and international policy or the post.
Tim McInerney
OK. So there’s kind of a local government in Belfast, and that’s called the assembly, and like a super government in Westminster, which governs the whole UK. So the DUP they sent representatives to Westminster but in the meantime, the assembly has kind of fallen apart.
Naomi O’Leary
The power sharing between the Nationalist Party, Sinn Féin and the DUP had been strained for quite a while. There was a huge scandal over the abuse OF renewable heat scheme, in particular, which caused the assembly to collapse. Anyway, it has remained broken down and talks are actually restarting possibly as we speak to get it back up and running but in the meantime, civil servants are acting as caretakers, so there isn’t a ruling assembly in place.
Tim McInerney
Indeed. There you go, John, who wrote in from Belfast. Thank you again for your question. If you’re listening and have any questions or comments, drop us a line on our website by email or on Twitter. We love hearing from you.
Naomi O’Leary
Okay. Let’s get back to the Irish language.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, the Irish language or Gaeilge, as it’s called in Irish, it’s the official language of the Republic of Ireland; the third oldest written language in Europe after Greek and Latin, and a subject that is guaranteed to raise passions, sometimes good, sometimes bad, if you bring it up with your Irish friends.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. And it’s something that people are often quite curious about, right? So it’s spoken by quite a small number of people. So just under 2 million in Ireland, according to the most recent figures.
Tim McInerney
And while more or less everyone in Ireland knows a little bit of the language, at least, sadly it has been in a steady decline for the past few generations. It used to be a majority language in Ireland until the Great Famine in the mid 19th century. But this unfortunately saw massive numbers of Irish speakers either die from starvation or be forced to emigrate elsewhere. For a long time the language was discouraged in Ireland, both by the Catholic Church and the British colonial administration and its large scale revival only begun about 100 years ago, by which time most of the damage had been done. Today, it’s spoken as a primary language only in pockets of the country, mostly on the West Coast.
Naomi O’Leary
So if you don’t live in Ireland you probably haven’t heard it very much or at all.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. And people, funnily enough, often assume that the Irish language is just some dialectical form of English or that it’s just English with an Irish accent. But of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth, right?
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah. I have heard that assumption. Of course, no, it’s very different. Like you said, Irish is a very old language. It’s hundreds of years older than English, actually. So there are very few linguistic links between the two of them. It’s from the Celtic family of languages, so it’s more closely related to, for example, the Breton language in France or the Welsh language or Scots Gaelic most closely.
Tim McInerney
And it actually even had its own alphabet until relatively recently. You might have seen a few of those figures on Irish pubs around the world because they make good graphic art now.
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah.
Tim McInerney
Yeah that alphabet isn’t really used anymore, but it has left the language with some pretty weird spelling, which I think a lot of people might have encountered. If you’ve ever had to spell an Irish name, you’ll probably have noticed this. So, S I O B H A N is pronounced Siobhan. Or Saoirse, which is another Irish name, like Saoirse Ronan the film star, that’s spelt S A O I R S E and so forth. It seems bizarre, I know, but it does have its own internal logic. You gotta trust us.
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah, it’s funny because it doesn’t even seem strange to me anymore and I don’t even realize that their pronunciation is counter-intuitive until I meet someone who isn’t familiar with them and they think the name “Owen” is “Eoin”, for example. As it happens, Tim, we both have Irish names alongside our, I suppose, Anglicized names. Most names in Ireland as they are were originally Irish and they were Anglicized so rendered into like an English-like spelling.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. Right. And in Irish they mean stuff, you know, just like English surnames. So my name McInerney also exists as Mac An Airchinnigh, which is three very long words, which means in total “Son of the guy who sells land to people to build churches on.”
Naomi O’Leary
Super specific. So my name is O’Leary, but it’s also Ní Laoghaire. So Ní Laoghaire is a bit more accurate because it means daughter, Ní means daughter as opposed to “O” or “Mac”, which means son. And the Laoghaire part refers to someone who keeps cattle and it’s the name of an old Gaelic clan. So incidentally, both versions are actually valid in Ireland and you can use either when whenever you want. I have to say, Tim, one of my favourite quirks that I like to tell people about Irish is that there’s no word for either “yes” or “no”. You have to conjugate every verb into a positive or a negative.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. This is a really funny one because in official documents, then for instance, if you have to vote, you can’t vote “yes” or “no” and since Irish is the official language of the Republic, when people vote in a Republican election of any sort, they actually vote Tá or Níl, which literally means “it is” or “it isn’t.” And that’s the closest that we could get really to “yes” or “no”.
Naomi O’Leary
Speaking of official documents, have you heard that in the European Union there is a huge investment right now into integrating Irish is an official language?
Tim McInerney
Yeah, I did hear this. What’s that about?
Naomi O’Leary
Okay, So basically in the European Union of the 28 states, only the UK actually has English as an official language. So there are other Anglophone countries, obviously Malta and Ireland, but they opted for their own traditional languages to be there official languages. So for Malta, it’s Maltese and for Ireland, it’s Irish.
Tim McInerney
What does that what does that really mean? That a language is a country’s official language in the EU for all intents and purposes, it means a lot of translation of documents. So, for example, in 2015, the European Commission had 1.6 million pages of documents translated into English.
Naomi O’Leary
So far, however, Irish really hasn’t been properly enacted as an official language because it kind of takes so much to build from nothing to the manpower that you need to carry out such feats of translation and interpretation. They got a reprieve for a few years to allow a transition period.
Tim McInerney
So this transition period is ending now, is that it?
Naomi O’Leary
That’s right. It’s supposed to end in 2017. So according to a leaked European Parliament document, the planned budget expenditure is about 3.7 million euros, which given the number of Irish speakers, is actually quite a lot. And they’ve so far this year listed 26 vacancies for Irish language speakers. That’s all according to reporting by Politico Europe, which is a site that I sometimes write for.
Tim McInerney
So there could be like a little community of Irish speakers living in Brussels soon enough then, which I suppose that would make it like a Brussels Gaeltacht — that’s what we call Irish speaking communities, by the way.
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah, well, according to an Irish speaker I spoke to there recently, they’re actually kind of is one in some respect. So it’s not geographical in that it’s a few streets or something. But there’s a network of Irish speakers in Brussels already who essentially all know each other and meet up to speak Irish. So they’re like translators and Irish language journalists and some MEPs like, for example, the Irish speaking Sinn Féin representative Liadh Ní Riada. In 2015, you know, she went on strike? So during Seachtain na Gaeilge, which is like the week-long festival of Irish, she refused to speak any English in the European Parliament to protest the lack of Irish in the EU.
Tim McInerney
I’m sure that raised a few eyebrows.
Naomi O’Leary
By all accounts, she’s known as a fairly determined advocate of the language. Let’s play some of that clip, actually. So this is my chat with Eoin Keane. He’s a member of the Gaeilgeoir, or Irish-speaking community in Brussels, and he spoke to me about what that’s like and his work as an Irish language reporter there. By the way, Tim, did you know that Irish speakers recently coined a term for Brexit?
Tim McInerney
You’re joking.
Naomi O’Leary
No, really. Okay, so as a contender we had sasamach.
Tim McInerney
Sas-amach … Oh, I see. Oh right, like how to explain this for our listener “Sasanach” is an English person like a Saxon and a “amach” means exit. So “Saxon-out”, I suppose?
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah, it’s kind of rude and that might be why it’s the one that didn’t end up in the dictionary, which is probably for the best. So yeah, Eoin was telling me how the official word for Brexit was coined and the role of Irish in Brussels. [Interview begins] So I’m sitting here with Eoin Keane and he’s based in Brussels and fascinatingly, he’s one of the Irish speaking community here. And we were just discussing how this is a new frontier really for the language. It’s kind of the European Union is facilitating an internationalisation of the language, which is almost unprecedented. Would you say that?
Eion Keane
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this the past two years of the European Union, since Irish has been recognised as an official language, has really been a huge step forward for the language and for its community. It’s as if we’ve finally been recognised on an international stage and even we’ve been afforded the respect that sometimes we didn’t get at home. I think anyone anywhere from Ireland would agree that Irish has had a bit of a chequered history in Ireland, so it’s great to finally see that support and to finally give an option to people who love the language, who want to study the language, and to give them the opportunity to travel and to get good employment with the language as well.
Naomi O’Leary
So how did you end up here as a Gaeilgeoir in Brussels?
Eion Keane
I’m from Clare in the west of Ireland, which isn’t an Irish language and region, but like a lot of people, I did it in school and then I went to the Gaeltacht, which is the Irish language area of Ireland, every summer when I was in my teens. And that’s where I really developed my grá for the language, or my love for the language, and then from then on, I started it in university again, working with it every summer. But I have to say that it’s afforded me a lot of opportunities. I travelled to Canada to work over there as an Irish language tutor in the University of Ottawa. And then even when I came over here, I started of working part-time with Raidió na Gaeltachta, which is the Irish language national broadcaster.
Naomi O’Leary
And what does your reporting involve?
Eion Keane
So mostly it’s about what’s going on in the European Union or “an tAontas Eorpach”. A lot of it is about Brexit, “breatimeacht”, which is literally “Britain leaving.”
Naomi O’Leary
Oh my God I love that, “breatimeacht”. I haven’t heard that one before. That’s a really good example of like modernization, I suppose, of the language. So it has to be innovated all the time. And do you know how they came up with that term breatimeacht?
Eion Keane
That’s actually, one of the show’s “Cormac ag a cúig”, it’s a political show. It’s on a every day at five o’clock, and they were frustrated that there was no word for Brexit; they always had to use Brexit, so they kind of came up with that themselves. “an Bhreatain” being Britain, imeacht being “leaving”, but it’s actually now been adopted and I think it’s going to be in the dictionary next year, So they’re really proud of themselves so well done to them.
Tim McInerney
I love there how Eoin slips in the odd Irish word even when he’s speaking in English, which is something that Irish people are wont to do.
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah, for sure.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, sure — whether they speak Irish a lot or not. This this brings up a really interesting aspect of the language, actually, that’s always interested me that it’s got a native version and it’s got this very official version.
Naomi O’Leary
Hang on. What do you mean by that?
Tim McInerney
Even though it’s the official language of Ireland, the vast majority of Irish speakers are actually second language learners, right? The population of people who speak it as a first language is actually less than 80,000, so it’s tiny. I got to see this firsthand in a strange way, because I grew up just outside Galway City, which is right on the border of one of the biggest gaeltachts or Irish speaking regions on the island. We would have learned just outside this boundary that a computer in Irish was called a “ríomhaire”, but in the gaeltacht, you know they’d actually just use the English word “computer” but that adapted to Irish grammar and Irish syntax. So, you know, “the computer” would be “an chomphútor”. That’s how you would adopt an Irish word grammatically. Or even “bicycle”, you know, the official Irish word for bicycle is “rothar”, which most people who learn Irish would use But in the gaeltacht, certainly in Connemara, they’d say “mo bhycicle” , which is again a grammatical adaptation of the English word bicycle.
Naomi O’Leary
I suppose in this, like we’re seeing the seams of the project to resurrect the language, which is really what it was because it came so close to extinction. I mean the only way of saving it is to teach people who haven’t known it before. You know, inevitably that does mean that you have a strange disconnect between those people who continue to use it as their native tongue, who continue to adapt it, and then the official version that gets written down in textbooks and so on, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. I wanted to mention, though, as well, Irish is enormously important as the national symbol. Its entire revival is tied up with political projects. And that’s something that’s ongoing.
Tim McInerney
Actually, I mean, Irish was a kind of soft cultural weapon in the war of independence, if you can look at it that way. One of the most important concepts of the independence movement, and I’ll talk a bit about this in my report later on, was to reclaim Irish culture. And a lot of people saw their own culture as something shameful. And the nationalist movement noticed that there was a lot of anxieties in particular about the language, right? Because Irish was unacceptable under the empire, but so was English spoken with an Irish accent. So for the nationalists, it seemed a bit like the Irish had no acceptable language and therefore no acceptable voice at all.
Naomi O’Leary
I guess this is something that’s quite common in general, in attitudes towards minority dialects. Like even to this day within Britain, for example, having, for example, like a Manchester accent or a strong regional accent can come with discrimination. You know, it has a long history of and kind of non-standard accents being represented as something ridiculous or incorrect.
Tim McInerney
It’s not only English either. Where I live in France, of course, accents outside the standard Parisian accents are ridiculed in just the same way. So you can see how for the nationalist movement, reclaiming Irish was something really powerful. And you have to remember that at that stage, loads of people or loads more people still spoke Irish as their first language.
Naomi O’Leary
Right, so from the very start, there was who founded the Irish state. They intended it to be bilingual, right?
Tim McInerney
Yeah. You can even see this in the Proclamation of the Republic, which declared an independent Ireland firstly during the 1916 rising. And the first words on that proclamation are, of course, in Irish to describe the country in Irish, “Poblacht na hÉireann.” And immediately after the Irish free state was established in 1922, Irish became compulsory for everyone who wanted to work in the public service. Irish was used for all important or ceremonial events, of course it still is. And all the government offices and titles are in Irish.
Naomi O’Leary
Of course, like “Taoiseach”, the word that bedevils all foreign correspondents or Tánaiste.
Tim McInerney
Right, that’s an equivalent of Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister, right but literally they mean, “Taoiseach” is a chief and a Tánaiste is a kind of chieftain. This extended to education as well. Of course, famously, all public schools still have to teach the language. And if you want to be a teacher, you have to pass a test in the language first and foremost. And even Irish policemen who are known officially, of course, in Irish as the “Garda Síochána”, which means guardians of the peace, they have to pass a test in Irish until 2005. The idea being that they were part of a society that was bilingual.
Naomi O’Leary
Interestingly, like the one sphere where I’ve noticed that there is an integration of Irish and English is actually in journalism. So when I went to report the election in 2016, the press conferences were completely bilingual. So the leaders of the Irish political parties had to be ready to take questions in both Irish and English because it was bilingual press and they knew that they would be, we ask questions in both.
Tim McInerney
There are certainly moments of glee in the media when politicians struggle with their Irish. But of course, all this stands in contrast to Northern Ireland, right, which is almost the direct opposite. Once the border was drawn, Northern Ireland remained under the control of the UK. And in fact, a unionist government that controlled province, especially during the first 50 years, was very hostile to the language. Because, of course, they associated it with this anti-British rebel movement in the Republic.
Naomi O’Leary
Of course, if you’re a rebel, if you have a language that amounts to like a secret language that people don’t understand, that’s actually quite useful in practical terms. So I understand that imprisoned IRA members adopted it so that they could communicate in jail without the guards understanding.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. Right. And one of the phrases that has become pretty well-known even in Britain is the Irish phrase for “Our day will come” which was a rallying cry for Republicans in Northern Ireland during the troubles. “Tiocfaidh ár lá” is the phrase. It refers, of course, to the ultimate goal of a united Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary
Mm. You know, I was speaking to an Irish language activist in Belfast this week, and he was saying that there are some former Republican prisoners who are now politicians who deliberately use Irish as a secret language to wind up their unionist colleagues. And some unionists are extremely hostile to it. So, for example, in Ballymena, the single Irish word “uisce” or “Water” had to be scrubbed off a manhole cover because a unionist councillor complained, you know, that it was part of debritishization.
Tim McInerney
God, right. Yeah. So it’s far from being depoliticized, anyway.
Naomi O’Leary
Far, far from being de-politicized. And you know, it actually had a huge role in the election this year in 2017. Did you see, Tim, for example, the photographs of people who were going to vote dressed in crocodile costumes?
Tim McInerney
Oh, yeah, yeah. What was that about? Well, let me tell you, that was all because of Irish. Arlene Foster, who’s the leader of the biggest unionist party, said that she wouldn’t agree to an Irish language act because agreeing to it would be like feeding crocodile; the nationalists would only come back for more.
Tim McInerney
Oh, right.
Naomi O’Leary
Essentially in Northern Ireland, Irish isn’t an official language, not like Welsh in Wales, and you know, the champions of the language want to change that.
Tim McInerney
I take it from that voting stance that the crocodile remark backfired a bit. It completely backfired. It galvanized the opposition and they adopted the crocodile as their symbol of the election. And of course Sinn Féin, the nationalists, were very pleased with the result. Funnily enough, Irish is actually having a mini revival not just among nationalists, but actually among a small number of unionists, too. The thinking goes like this: You know, if you see Northern Ireland as British and Irish as an indigenous language there, well, then Irish is part of British culture as much as part of Irish culture.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, of course it’s not widely recognised that there are still loads of Irish speakers in the province. But I suppose this is a common element right of language disputes all around the world. Languages are so personal and so closely linked to identity that they can be very emotive subjects and people can get fired up quite rightly about them very quickly. It’s a way of —
Naomi O’Leary
Absolutely.
Tim McInerney
Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary
French in France and the encroachment of English, I’m sure you know very well.
Tim McInerney
For sure, and even French in Quebec, for instance, as well. So in my report for this episode, I spoke to Irish language researchers in different time zones, actually three different time zones, to see how the language and its turbulent history affects the way people relate to the language around the world.
Joe Heaney
[Joe Heaney singing “Cailleach and airgead”‘Sí do mhaimeo í, ‘sí do mhaimeo í’Sí do mhaimeo í, ‘sí cailleach an airgid’Sí do mhaimeo í, ó Bhaile Iorrais Mhóir í’S chuirfeadh sí cóistí ar bhóithre Cois Fharraige …]
Tim McInerney
That’s the voice of Joe Heaney. He’s a singer from the Connemara region of Ireland, and that was recorded back in 1979 in New York. Today we call this kind of singing sean-nós, which means “the old style.” It has a reputation of being the purest form of Irish art. But a lot of this is actually down to a kind of exoticizing, outside perspective. Here’s Dr Lillis Ó Laoire, senior lecturer in Celtic Civilization at the National University of Ireland in Galway. His recent book, Bright Star of the West, explores the sean-nós and the tradition of storytelling in Irish. And just like so many other aspects of the Irish language, he notes that sean-nós singing often became tangled up with the identity politics of Ireland’s independent state.
Dr Lillis Ó Laoire
Sean-nós is a form of Acappella or unaccompanied song. It’s solo and it’s the way, again, probably because of poverty and the lack of instruments, it’s the way that people sang and in kitchens for hundreds of years. And then it became something that the Gaelic League adopted as a pure form of Irish art in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th.
Tim McInerney
The Gaelic League was a cultural organization in the early 20th century. In fact, it’s still around, but more usually known today by its Irish name, Conradh na Gaeilge. For them, the Irish language was a profoundly important symbol. In the years leading up to the war of independence, they set up a whole network of cultural institutions, community events, sports, dancing, carnivals, the whole lot. All founded around the principle of promoting the language. Language revivalists spoke what they knew loudly on the streets of Dublin: “Dia dhuit”, “go raibh maith agat”, “slán abhaile”. The principle was “cúpla focail”, or the few words, meaning that any Irish was better than none. I think it’s difficult for us today to fully understand how radical this was. Under British rule, the Irish language was not seen as a good thing. On the contrary, it was provincial, barbarous, a hindrance rather than an asset. For the previous 50 years, the imperial government had tried to eliminate the language and replace it with English all over the country. In their minds, this simply represented progress. So by insisting on speaking Irish, the Gaelic League were overtly rejecting British standards of civility and British culture in general. The virtue of the language for them was that it was so decidedly un-British. It was one of the remnants of life before colonisation and represented a sense of Irishness that didn’t exist in relativity to Britain. As such, it was an incredibly effective tool of nationalist resistance. People who embraced the language were true Irishmen, according to the revivalists, while those who rejected it were pejoratively denounced, as “West Britons.” Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam; a country without a native tongue, is a country without a soul. The great irony of this of course, was that revivalists often preferred their own fantasy of the language to its realities. When they went out to record the folk tales of the native speakers, mostly on the west coast, they were often shocked to hear that stories were quite sexually and morally frank. Like folk tales everywhere else, they were full of bawdy humour and dirty jokes, and the sean-nós songs were no different. The one you heard just now tells the story of a rich, old hag. The singer called her “cailleach an airgead”, the “money witch” and tells us about the young alcoholic who’s trying to marry her to get at her fortune. Here’s Lillis again:
Dr Lillis Ó Laoire
Irish is out there to English speakers a lot of the time. It’s something that’s often poorly understood and people who habitually speak Irish view it differently. For them, for us, I should say, Irish is a normal mode of communication. It’s very difficult to communicate that ordinariness to people who are coming perhaps from a romantic perspective that sees Irish as something perhaps that’s pure, unadulterated, that might be a representation of the best of Irishness. You know that definitely has an effect on the way Irish is perceived. I suppose a lot of the revivalists would have fetishize that sort of sense of strong spirituality that people have and they emphasize that point to the exclusion of other aspects of people’s character.
Tim McInerney
Putting Irish on a moral pedestal in Ireland continued well after independence. For many in the free state, Irish was the ultimate representation of Irishness and many of the revivalist tried to cleanse it of everything they considered vulgar. Let’s face it, the first words that everyone wants to know in a foreign language are usually swear words. But in the state version of Irish, even these were carefully sanitized. Instead, students studied works like the autobiography of Peig Sayers, which was so completely censored of anything considered morally or sexually dubious that it became singularly famous for being dry, bleak and boring. In one of his recent articles, Lillis Ó Laoire talks about one of the most high profile cases of Irish language censorship which happened in the 1940s.
Dr Lillis Ó Laoire
The controversy that I referred to was that of “The Tailor and Anstee”, two country dwellers who lived in rural Cork and this English journalist Eric Cross visited them and he wrote down many of the stories that he heard from them and presented in a book in the early 40s. And that book caused a scandal.
Tim McInerney
The scandal was something of a culture clash. People in Irish speaking regions had been, to a certain extent, cut off from Victorian standards of sexual morality, standards that still reigned strong in Britain and English-speaking Ireland in the 1940s. The book’s central storyteller, the tailor Tahdg O’Buachalla and even more controversially, his wife, Anstee, whose full name, by the way, was Anastasia, had no qualms about discussing their sex life with full candour. Anstee referred to the men she met as “stail” by which she meant “stallions” and at one point in the book, the tailor suggests that World War Two would never have happened if fascists had followed the example of Irish peasants and spent more time enjoying the pleasures of “breeding”. The usual suspects came out in force against the book. The Catholic Church, of course, hit the roof, but so did the Dublin bourgeoisie, for whom Irish was supposed to be a bastion of national pride, not a smutty joke.
Dr Lillis Ó Laoire
The element who was scandalized was very vocal and very persuasive, and they were powerful. Some of them were Senate members; it led to a four-day discussion in the Senate. It led to a condemnation of the old couple who had given the journalist stories. In fact, one priest went to them and asked them to repudiate the book and had the book burned, a copy of the book burned in front of them. The lady, Anstee, was called a moron. You know, it was really quite extreme. And the book was banned and not published again until the 1960s.
Tim McInerney
Even the sections quoted in the Senate were later struck from the record so that they couldn’t defend anyone’s eyes again. In Irish, these stories had just been part of a communal oral tradition. People had been telling stories like this for centuries, but once they were translated into English, they became lousy with political and nationalistic significance.
Joe Heaney
Joe Heaney singing.
Tim McInerney
Funnily enough, Ireland wasn’t the only country in which the Irish language was being discussed in Parliament. In his recent book, Míle Míle i gCéin: The Irish Language in Canada, the Canadian researcher Danny Doyle explores the hidden history of the language in his country.
Danny Doyle
Once you become involved in the community of Irish speakers here in Canada, you realise that it’s just everywhere, like the country just has speakers all over the place. You start thinking how could this only have recently happened; it must have been here in history as well. And the more you get digging into it, the more you realize that there was this very, very widespread amount of Gaelic speakers, Irish and Scottish Gaelic speakers right across Canada.
Tim McInerney
Looking back at the Canadian Census of 1871, which incidentally was the first of its kind, since the country itself would only been established a few years before. Danny noticed that the proportion of Irish people living in Canada was astonishingly high, even after post immigration was taken into account.
Danny Doyle
Shocking for a lot of people is that the majority was French, but usually when people think of Canada, they think that we are French and English. But what the census shows us was that we were actually one quarter Irish, which outnumbered both the English, one fifth, and Scottish one sixth element in Canada, so Canadians really are more of being French and Irish than they are French and English. The other really important census was 1901, which was the first one that allowed you to put down that you spoke Irish or Scottish Gaelic as your daily language. Some centres had, about 22 percent of the population listed themselves as speaking the Irish language daily.
Tim McInerney
One of the interesting parts about Danny’s research is that it gives the language and alternative history. Far from trying to make it an exclusive national symbol, Irish speakers in Canada actually teamed up with Scottish Gaelic speakers, of whom there were quite a few as well. It might be noted that both languages are to some extent mutually intelligible. They’re a bit like maybe distinct dialects of Italian. So together these Irish speakers and these Scottish Gaelic speakers in 1890 petitioned the Canadian parliament to make a kind of Irish-Scottish Gaelic the third national language of Canada.
Danny Doyle
Unfortunately, due to Victorian attitudes towards languages at the time, they thought that languages shaped how your brain works. English was very powerful, obviously empirical language. French was very diplomatic and economic language. And the majority of senators in the room believed that Gaelic languages were only good for witch stories and poetry. And they had one or two people saying yes, but if we were to have these other languages, wouldn’t an artistic and poetic language be of use to our fledgling country? But the bill failed. It was about 49 senators voted against it, compared only six that voted for it, and it was never debated again.
Tim McInerney
The alternative history stops abruptly there without a language revival, Irish in Canada was fully vulnerable to the imperial policy on minority languages. In future censuses, Danny notes that people who claimed to have spoken Irish were crossed off the official forms with pencil and the words “English” written above. This came hand-in-hand with an education system that was designed to instil all minority languages with shame and negative connotations.
Danny Doyle
Really, it was a worldwide system that was under the British Empire. They did the same things in Australia against the First Nations there. Languages were, for the most part, instilled with shame and humiliation in the schools. Children were beaten to have language taken out of them and to distance them from their culture. And they all kind of took the same flavour, so the Welsh knot in Wales, “butiscór” in Ireland, the “maide crochaidh” if you were in in Maritime Canada, the hanging stick, and they all took kind of the same idea where a stick would be notched for the infractions throughout the day, whoever would be speaking Gaelic, and you have to tell on someone else to pass on this stick. Whoever was wearing the stick at the end of the day would be beaten for how many infractions there were. So it created this culture in the schools that you were doing something wrong by speaking your native language.
Tim McInerney
The result was that the language was all but annihilated in Canada within one generation. But that said, the story of Irish is not quite finished there either. Danny himself is part of a network of Irish speakers who are now trying to promote the language once again in Canada, near Ontario is the only Irish speaking region or gaeltacht outside the island of Ireland. People come from all over North America and beyond to attend cultural events and competitions. I asked him how, having become fluent, he would characterize the language for somebody who didn’t know it. And this is what he said.
Danny Doyle
Just the depth of language that there are 4,400 four different words in the language just for describing people. So we have words like “ceartaseach [?]”, and “ceartaseach” is a person who only does the absolute bare minimum of the amount of work that they’re assigned, and that’s a word that is eminently useful and descriptive, but that you wouldn’t find in other languages. Or something like “cuisle sleibhte”, which is “cuisle” is your heartbeat, your pulse, and “sleibhte” is the mountain side, so “cuisle sleibhte” would be an overgrown river where you can hear it, but you can’t see it, so it’s the pulse of the mountain as it flows down. And these beautiful ideas that as soon as you start describing the language to people, people tend to go, I really want to learn that language.
Tim McInerney
And it looks like Danny is not the only one in Canada who wants to learn the language. This is Brendan Flynn, originally from Wicklow near Dublin, who now lives in Vancouver.
Brendan Flynn
I’m a structural engineering technologist by profession. I’ve put the engineering on the back burner until I complete the monument.
Tim McInerney
The monument is the Ireland Canada Monument and Brendon’s been working on getting it built for the last 12 years. He came to Canada from his hometown of Bray back in the 70s, and since then he has always wanted to create a monument for the relationship between Ireland and his adopted country. This is what he envisions for Vancouver’s Wayne Bourne Park.
Brendan Flynn
We were looking to try and put up a shamrock, something Irish, pints of Guinness or something like that. We wanted to make it a place where people could go and be as much Canadian in the site as it is Irish in the site. A wall built in the west of Ireland, you know the old stone walls.?
Tim McInerney
Yeah, yeah.
Brendan Flynn
It would be sort of like that, with the names of Irish Canadians on the wall recognizing major contributions of the Irish to Canada.
Tim McInerney
To raise funds for the monument, Brendan decided to take a chance on opening an Irish language school in his own house. It was a shot in the dark, especially since he wasn’t even a native speaker himself. But when word got around, he was pretty shocked at how many people were interested.
Brendan Flynn
We began in September 2007 with the first class and a 10 people showed up week after week. The teachers were the last to come to the door; the students were always the first coming to the door. It was such an interest in learning the language. There was something wonderful growing in my house. Then as time went on, we realised there was so much demand in people attending the classes that we had to put on two classes and three classes. We had two classes running upstairs in my house and another class running in the basement, all at the same time. So it’s just wonderful to see it happen. Languages are the core of who we are. I am not fluent, but I sit in my car going to work at 20 kilometers each way, every day. And I have “Buntús cainte” tapes running all the time , so the language going into my head, it might be going out the other side, but I feel I’m picking up something all the time.
Tim McInerney
In listening to Brendan on the other side of the world, keeping up with his cúpla focail, sometimes it’s hard to believe that this language is dying at all. As Brendan says himself, even if it goes in one ear and out the other, what else are languages for?
Joe Heaney
Joe Heaney singing
Naomi O’Leary
Tim, thank you so much for that report. I thought it was fascinating and I learned a lot myself. It struck me as quite interesting, just the energy and positivity about Irish that people have around the world, particularly given that at least in my experience within Ireland there’s quite a lot of negativity about it.
Tim McInerney
We both grew up learning the language ourselves, so we’re definitely not unaffected by the various attitudes surrounding it. The situation has become inverted in a way because a lot of people feel ashamed today because they can’t speak the language. And a lot of others resent the fact that they’re even expected to, as if it makes them less Irish because they don’t speak the language. Growing up near the gaeltacht, I definitely was aware of a sharp line between native speakers and people who had learned the language as a second language. And gaeilgeoirs have been accused of being elitist and unaccommodating to people who are making a real effort to learn.
Naomi O’Leary
So you think it’s not always the most a welcoming language to learn?
Tim McInerney
I’m not sure if that can be anyone’s fault, because just like anyone who speaks a language fluently, there will always be an invisible boundary between a first language speaker and a second language speaker with that ease of comfort in communication and that sense of nuance that you really probably will never get, or you have to be very lucky to totally get it. But the sense of exclusion is pretty unfortunate because, you know, at the same time, growing up, I witnessed the death of the language really in quite a brutal way. Like you used to go down to the shop maybe and speak to the shopkeeper in Irish or they’d speak to you and your reply, or if you met an old person, especially, you know, to show respect, you’d speaking Irish to them. But then when those people started to die, you just stopped speaking Irish at all. Even sadder, I think, for people like you and me, it’s pretty easy to forget the language very quickly once you leave the country. I haven’t spoken it actively now in about 15 or 20 years, really. And it’s hard to imagine a context where this will happen again.
Naomi O’Leary
It’s really difficult to keep it up if you’re not using it. And particularly if you have to learn other languages. Like I learned Italian and when I learned that that was when I noticed that my Irish was like just pushed out of my brain. It was frightening, the first time I discovered how much I’d lost. Some of my earliest memories, they’re being taught Irish by my dad. He taught me how to count in Irish when I was a toddler.
Tim McInerney
Aw.
Naomi O’Leary
Yeah, he’s quite passionate about it. I felt quite loyal to the language when I was at school and I tried really hard at it. I grew up in Dublin, but I always struggled. I did notice the difference as soon as I went to the gaeltacht for the summer school though.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. Eoin talked about that earlier, didn’t he? And he said the same thing, that that’s where he really learned his Irish. Maybe you can explain what it is.
Naomi O’Leary
You live with an Irish speaking household and you have lessons in the morning and Gaelic games in the afternoon and in the evening you have céilí and you’re supposed to speak Irish the whole time and you’re there with like 150 other teenagers and getting up to all sorts of fun. I just loved it. And it became for me the first language that I could speak conversationally apart from English, which was just magical to discover. I picked it up really quickly as soon as it was being spoken around me, which was completely different from school. I mean, do you think there’s a problem with how it’s taught?
Tim McInerney
Right. Well, that’s the big question, right? If you ask any Irish person about Irish in the education system, they’re going to have strong opinions on the matter, either way. I think the general consensus in the Republic has been that it has been traditionally taught extraordinarily badly in the school system, even though it’s compulsory for everyone. But then lots of educational practice in recent decades has been pretty, pretty dire, you know.
Naomi O’Leary
Right.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. So there’s a tendency to blame Irish, I think, for the problems with the education system in general. I was speaking to one Irish teacher in the lead up to that report who told me that he actually avoids telling people that he’s an Irish teacher because they almost always get so aggressive with him and they basically blame him for all their unhappy memories at school.
Naomi O’Leary
That’s terrible.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, he has a hard time, kind of like getting across, “It wasn’t me, you know.” And more broadly, it wasn’t just Irish. Maths were terribly taught too, you know.
Naomi O’Leary
Of course, this isn’t specifically an Irish problem either. All Anglophone countries struggle to get students to learn second languages because English is the global lingua franca, so you can totally avoid being exposed to other languages quite easily, if you want. And you know, teenagers are a bit lazy, so they might well do that. In my experience, anyway, it’s the day to day exposure and just natural working with another language that’s necessary to learn it. But you know, funnily enough, I have seen it reported that the thing that caused Martin McGuinness to decide to collapse the Northern Ireland Assembly was the decision to cut grants for poorer students to attend the gaeltacht.
Tim McInerney
That’s really interesting because I suppose that move could have made it so much more accessible to people up there. The economic factor is an enormous consideration in the Republic, too. For instance, a lot of people would think twice about enrolling their kids in an all Irish speaking school or a “gaelscoil”, since they consider learning the language to be a kind of luxury, not a necessity. And they just don’t want their children to waste their time with it.
Naomi O’Leary
And it’s also important to not to forget that Irish people’s version of English, hiberno English, is also very valuable and it’s part of our heritage, too. It’s made a wonderful contribution to literature, for example.
Tim McInerney
I totally agree. And while Irish was promoted as this pure thing, Irish accents and dialects in English were often derided as somehow a kind of mongrel or unoriginal. People still make fun of them, even within Ireland. But hiberno English is really unique and really beautiful mode of speech that I think we take for granted in Ireland a bit. It certainly strikes me really, really strongly when I go back now, how lyrical it is.
Naomi O’Leary
It is. I really enjoy how people speak in Ireland for sure. I think what makes it unique, from my understanding, is the blend of English with Irish. So Irish people sometimes use English with Irish grammatical structures. So like, “I do be going” or “I do be doing”, which is a continuous present that consumes from Irish.
Tim McInerney
Yeah. And you’ll notice that the tendency for people not to say “yes” or “no” actually even when they’re speaking English in Ireland, and that’s a direct influence from Irish, you know, they’ll say things like “I did” or “I didn’t” or “she went” or “she didn’t go”. The syntax also has this great sense of suspense, which I really love, which is a direct transposition of Irish syntax. So the object of the sentence normally comes first and what’s going to happen to the object is gonna come way later in the sentence, so if you take an example in standard English, you might say, did you think about calling Liam? But in hiberno English, this would become “Is it Liam that you said you wouldn’t be thinking about calling?” So, you know, you’re going up and down hills and valleys of emotion before you actually get to the end of the sentence. This is just a normal way to construct a sentence in Irish. But when that syntax is used in English, it’s really effective. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons why hiberno English is so good for literature.
Naomi O’Leary
There’s really so much we could say about this but for a time constraints, I think we’re gonna have to sign up.
Tim McInerney
Yeah, and I’m pretty sure a lot of you listening will have your own two cents to throw in because that’s usually the direction this conversation goes.
Naomi O’Leary
Yes, so do discuss amongst yourselves and let us know if you have any comments.
Tim McInerney
So next week we’ll be tackling a rather different and somewhat awkward issue and that is the curious knowledge gap in the UK about Ireland and Northern Ireland. This became painfully evident during the recent Brexit talks and the election, as you might have noticed from our previous episodes, when it became clear that not many people in the UK knew who was in control of the Northern Irish government, despite the fact that Northern Ireland is an integral part of the UK. And that knowledge gap is really quite unusual if you think about it. And now it’s having major consequences for the future of the EU and for the union itself. So to find out more, we’ll be speaking to Politico journalist Harry Cooper, who has this to say on the matter.
Harry Cooper
I really struggle to remember ever being taught about The Troubles. I always feel slightly embarrassed when my Irish friends jokingly, often jokingly, will say, “Oh, you, you awful English person” like referring to these crimes that the Brits committed in Ireland in the last century. I don’t know what those crimes are.
Tim McInerney
We’ll also be speaking to Siobhán Fenton from The Independent, who told us this:
Siobhán Fenton
In my own experience from living in England, for quite a while, is lots of people that I meet don’t realise that Northern Ireland is in the UK. I did an interview with a BBC radio show recently and just before I went on, one of the researchers said me, “So unionists are the Catholics and nationalists are the Protestants, isn’t that right? Just to check before we go live.”
Tim McInerney
So definitely tune in for that one. In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed this Irish language episode of the Irish Passport. And if you have anything to add, we’d love to hear from you at theirishpassport@gmail.com.
Naomi O’Leary
Or, we’re on Twitter at @PassportIrish, as well as our website www.irishpassport.com.
Tim McInerney
The Irish passport was written and produced by me, Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary
And me, Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney
And the songs and stories of Joe Heaney you heard in this episode were brought to you with the kind permission of Dr Lillis Ó Laoire of NUI Galway. If you want to hear more of these, Lillis has uploaded a whole selection of digitalized recordings on www. joeheaney.org. And of course you’ll find links to that too on our website.
Naomi O’Leary
Thanks so much for joining us.