From beer ads to Oscar ceremonies, the Irish language is now synonymous with postmodern cool. Five Irish speakers, from beginner to native, discuss the second Gaelic Revival
MOST OF US are guilty of re-engaging with the cúpla focal when we're abroad, using it as a sort of secret code so that we can talk about our fellow passengers on a bus or train. In Germany many moons ago, a friend and I used the Our Father in Irish in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to try and impress two fräuleins. "Ár nAthair, atá ar neamh," says I. "Go naofar d'ainm. Go dtaga do ríocht," says he in response, and on we went, line by line, until we got to that piece near the end that no one can ever remember.
You might have seen Carlsberg's latest commercial where three Irish guys in a bar in Brazil use a comical jumble of primary-school Gaeilge when asked to do something Irish. "Is maith liom cáca milis. Agus Sharon Ní Bheoláin."
The ad-makers have hit on something quite fundamental about our relationship with our native tongue. We may have resented the fact that it was rammed down our throats in school, but later on in life it can become a tool for us to express our cultural identity. And let's be honest - in an increasingly globalised world, there aren't too many of those left.
There is also a feeling that the diverse nationalities living in Ireland may in fact serve to promote the language. Not because we want to speak a language that other nationalities can't understand to exclude them from the conversation, but simply because we see people from other cultures speaking their own languages and we realise that our native tongue is an important part of who we are.
Undoubtedly, the image of the language has changed dramatically in recent years. Gaelscoileanna, TG4, Raidió na Gaeltachta, Hector, SeáÓg, Kíla - all have played their part in giving Irish a vibrant makeover and making it, dare we say it, cool. It is far too early to call it a revival, and the predominant view is still that it is deeply impractical and of little use in modern life. But there is increasing evidence that it is moving beyond its traditional strongholds - Gaeltachts and the classroom - and thriving in the most unlikely of places.
Witness the prevalence of Irish language films and TV programmes at this year's Iftas, or Glen Hansard's "Go raibh míle míle maith agat" at the Oscars. Look at the weekly Irish language get-togethers in pubs in Cork and Dublin; or the amount of Irish on the airwaves (including a brand new station, Raidio X) and on TV. As Dara Ó Cinnéide said, if the Irish language were a virus, they'd be calling it an epidemic.
Orla Nic Shuibhne
Appropriately enough perhaps, the current director of Seachtain Na Gaeilge, Orla Nic Shuibhne, is not from a Gaeltacht area.
"I always say to people that you don't have to be from a Gaeltacht to learn the language. My dad was an Irish speaker and a great lover of the language. I went to school at Gaelscoileanna and while we spoke it at school, we pretty much left it at the school gates, which was probably a pity. I meet young school kids now who speak it outside school and it's great to see them so confident about using the language."
Nic Shuibhne did stints with An Gúm and as language development officer with Roscommon County Council before landing her current role. Given the youthful buzz that currently surrounds the language, it is fitting that a 30-year-old is at the helm of Seachtain na Gaeilge.
"It's amazing that all these language agencies are being run by a much younger crew now. Young people are planning and delivering the direction of the language."
Top of the Seachtain na Gaeilge to-do list for the bainisteoir each year is the CD compilation, Ceol, which has featured the likes of Bell X1, Mundy, Declan O'Rourke and The Frames performing their own songs in Irish.
"People can't believe we get them on board, but it's a word of mouth thing now. We translate the song for them and help them with pronunciation if required.
The key to the success of the project is that they are not major Irish speakers. I would say 80 per cent of the artists involved haven't a word of Irish, but they get seriously into it. When they finish recording, they are just buzzing at what they have achieved."
Nic Shuibhne attended a Declan O'Rourke gig at the Olympia recently and was stunned to hear the crowd chanting for him to sing a song in Irish.
"Mundy told me that the same thing happened him, but to have witnessed that myself was just incredible. It was like an out-of-body experience. It just confirms to me that we are putting the language on the map in a different way. Even though the artists aren't confident about their own abilities, the difference they are making to the language, unbeknownst to themselves, is unbelievable. They are learning Declan O'Rourke songs now in the Gaeltachts instead of Óró sé do Bheatha 'bhaile."
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Daire Bracken
"I was born, bred and buttered in Dublin," says 30-year-old Daire Bracken, a qualified architect and fiddler with traditional Irish band Slide. "We weren't from an Irish-speaking family, but my dad took an interest in it and learned it himself. We all went to Scoil Lorcáin. We would speak a little at home but my mam didn't speak it, so we didn't overdo it."
Bracken found kindred souls while studying architecture at UCD. "It was unusual, I suppose, to find a group of architects yapping in Irish in the canteen, especially since architecture was sort of seen as this west-Brit course. But it was weird, it was like everyone on the course had this closet desire to learn Irish. In school it was a subject that people had to do but in their 20s and 30s I think a lot of people realise that it can be a full-on conversational language. I have a friend who told me that he was away and he was trying to show he was Irish and realised that he had nothing with which he could do that. He had this language in his head and he wanted to revisit it."
Bracken's band, Slide, are regulars at Sult, a bi-weekly social gathering of Irish speakers which takes place in the Vaults under Connolly Station.
"It's not entirely new in that Club Conradh has been going on for years, but I think Sult gave a new energy to it. It's mostly young people. It's usually very casual, people are just yapping away in Irish. The great thing about it is that you never feel bad about speaking Irish at it. It's understood that that's what the whole thing is about. It's amazing the number of people who come along just to listen and are fascinated to learn that they have more Irish than they thought."
How often does he speak Irish day-to-day? "It happens by accident a lot of the time. You would be talking to someone and half way through the conversation you realise that the other person speaks the language too so you continue in Irish. It's like this connection. There's no question but that Irish is cool now, certainly among my age group anyway. There's no longer that whole city/culchie thing, and if anything the numbers show that it's increasing in urban areas."
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Dara Ó Cinnéide
"I don't obsess about it or think about it all that much," says the former All-Ireland winning Kerry captain about the daily usage of his native tongue. "It's predominantly a means of communication for me. It's what comes out of my
mouth when I go to speak. It's impossible in this day and age to use Irish all the time, but I would say that I use it 75 per cent of the time.
"I have a great love of the English language, but it is my second language. I think in Irish, I dream in Irish. I read mainly in English but that's an availability thing really, there are just more English-language publications than there are Irish."
Ó Cinnéide grew up in the renowned Gaeltacht area of Corca Dhuibhne in Co Kerry and was steeped in the language from an early age. "Irish was the first language at home, I mean my grandparents and my father spoke Irish exclusively. So in that sense, learning English was the hard part. As we grew a little older and went to school, it was very much a mix, we were a real bilingual family. I speak Irish with my own two daughters all the time. English will be everywhere they go as they get older, so I have no worries about them picking up English."
Perhaps in common with many native Irish speakers from Gaeltacht areas, Ó Cinnéide does not have that same blinding optimism about the future of the language that you often see elsewhere. "Sometimes I'm optimistic and sometimes I'm deeply pessimistic. I think there is certainly a lot of goodwill towards it at the moment and the hostility that was there has mainly evaporated, which is a good thing. But the language is still being pushed underground all the time in a very passive, subtle way, and you are forced to speak English to accommodate other people, which is very strange. You can't go into a shop and ask for something in Irish for example - it's made very difficult for you to speak Irish even though it should be a personal decision.
"Things like Seachtain na Gaeilge are a great effort, but it takes more than that. At the moment it's mainly being done by the schools and there have been huge mistakes in the promotion of the language in the past."
Aoife Ní Thuairisg
TG4 and Paisean Faisean luminary Ní Thuairisg was raised and still lives in the Connemara Gaeltacht. "My mother tells a story about me being a big Sesame Street fan and how I found it frustrating because I couldn't understand what Big Bird was saying. She hosted kids coming to the Gaeltacht each summer so I suppose that was our first real exposure to English. It's the first time you realise that not everyone talks like you talk. We would have been picking up English from TV, but it would have been very broken. It was only when we were around seven years old that we became fluent."
To this day, she says, English is not a major part of her life. "English is the language I tend to speak to my husband but outside of that it is really not that useful to me. He is not an Irish speaker but he works in TG4 as well so he can follow everything and I don't feel the need to switch to English."
Ní Thuairisg is currently expecting the couple's first child. "It's so important for me that our child will be able to speak Irish to communicate. My niece is two and she is teaching others around her to speak Irish. When they are confronted with a child speaking Irish, people suddenly start plucking words from somewhere."
She is reluctant to call the current interest in Irish a revival. "If it's a revival, it's in its infancy. I do think that TG4 has played a big part in it because it has changed the way the language is expressed. When Hector came along people saw this guy speaking a sort of pidgin Irish/English on a channel that they may have associated with the hardcore Gaeilgeoir. I saw the change over time, like in bars and clubs guys would come up and chat you up and wouldn't be afraid to say a few words of Irish.
"People don't have the same hang-ups. I went to my first Iftas this year and there was Irish everywhere. Even Mel Gibson was so exposed to the language in the course of the evening that he said 'Can I feel you up Margaret?' in his own acceptance speech, which I think he thought was 'Go raibh míle maith agat'. I was just thinking, wow, this is just unbelievable."
Des Bishop
When comedian Eddie Izzard took his 1997 show Glorious to France and performed it in French, he at least had the benefit of having learned the language in school. Des Bishop performs a stand-up gig as Gaeilge for his new show, In the Name of the Fada, having spent just 11 months learning Irish in the Connemara Gaeltacht. Bishop has lived in Ireland since he was a teenager but he was spared the ordeal of learning Irish in school.
"I was exempt and I would have to say thank God for that. I'm pretty fluent now, and I don't know if I would be if I had done it at school." Stand-up comedy is the ultimate high-wire act at the best of times - why make it harder by doing it in a different language? "I wanted some sort of goal while I was learning it, some sort of endgame. Stand-up is the way I like to express myself, so it was natural to do it that way."
He has done warm-up gigs in Irish, including one in the Co Meath Gaelacht of Ráth Cairn. "I'll put my hands up and say that I'm not really able to be funny using the mechanics of Irish yet so most of the material is story based. There were times in the warm-up gigs where it was just going so well, I was thinking, wow, I am being funny, in Irish. I was even dealing with heckles in Irish."
You get the feeling that there are complex motives behind his desire to learn the language - that it's about a sense of identity, a sense of Irishness. "I have always had that confusion about identity, being an American living in Ireland and speaking the language does give me this confidence that I feel more Irish. I've always felt funny when the National Anthem is played, thinking that it's not really my anthem. I was at the Ireland-England rugby match last year and I had only been learning Irish for a few weeks but the national anthem came on and I felt like I had a right to stand up and sing the f**king thing. If the language gave me that, then that's a pretty powerful experience for a bunch of words. It's not just a form of communication."
There are, he says, compelling reasons why we should consider learning (or relearning) the Irish language. "I love it for two reasons. There is that spiritual thing, it gives you a connection to a place, but I also love it because it is a unique language. There is this incredible roundabout way of saying things, you know the way you say 'the hunger is on me - tá ocras orm.' It's sort of stuck in a time warp, and I mean that with the greatest possible respect. My brothers hear me talking it and they say f**king hell, it really is different."
Bishop believes that the resurgent interest in Gaeilge is a reaction to globalisation and the homogenisation of culture.
"I think when you have a Starbucks on every corner and every Irish street starts to look like a street in Birmingham, your language becomes a unique cultural expression. Maybe it's a fear of losing identity or a nationalistic thing, but definitely in some sort of subconscious way people are being inspired and motivated to have another look at Irish."
Will he be frustrated by the lack of opportunity to speak Irish day-to-day? "The Irish language gang have sort of adopted me, so for the moment I'm immersed in it. But in the future? I don't know. I think rather than be frustrated with it, I would be trying to motivate people to speak it. I think the time is ripe but maybe that's the naivety of the recent convert. Nobody can deny that there's a momentum behind it. It is becoming associated with forward thinking and innovation, even with wealth and elitism, which is just f**king comical given where it's come from."
In keeping with that can-do attitude, he is taking his own practical steps to promote the language, harassing mobile phone companies to have predictive text in Irish and setting up an interactive Irish-language course on his website (www.desbishop.com). In the Name of the Fada will also include a Jamie Oliver-esque meeting with Minister for Education Mary Hanafin.
"I've been learning the language for a year and I'm pretty fluent, but she has kids coming out of school after 14 years of mandatory Irish and they can't speak a word. We are stuck with this ancient curriculum and ancient teaching methods. I'm going to tell her that what she's doing doesn't work." No better man.
In the Name of the Fada is on Thursdays, 10.15pm on RTÉ One