This, I guess, is the dreaded day for many Leaving Certificate students. Today it’s Irish (Paper I) and students without a convenient exemption must struggle with the vexatious complications of the briathra neamhrialta and the peculiarities of the modh coinníollach in a tongue the vast majority have never used naturally.
Likely most candidates will find themselves deeply resenting the remaining compulsory aspects of Irish as they grope to find an appropriate saor briathair to impress the examiners. And indeed I can’t blame them, for at school I didn’t care much for “ár dteanga féin” either. To a 1970s teenager, the language seemed preposterously unfashionable and irrelevant. Then, later events changed my viewpoint.
Encountering other nationalities, speaking their native tongue with pride, I began pondering the ironies of being constantly mistaken on my travels for an Englishman abroad. So I undertook a few Irish classes, did a couple of residential Gaeltacht courses and became cuísach maith as Gaelige. But then, like the terrier that caught its own tail, the question arose, what next?
Immediately apparent was the sad fact that Irish woefully lacked everyday utility. There were unpromising encounters with those, líofa as Gaelige, who usually seemed to inhabit the upper echelons of the public service. Opening a conversation with these exalted polymaths was invariably an intimidating experience. It wasn’t that they weren’t tolerant of those less linguistically endowed: it just always seemed strange and contrived for two English-speakers to struggle with a very one-sided conversation in another tongue that only one had mastered.
Then there were the inevitable encounters with the grammatically obsessed. Once in an Irish club when I ventured that the way ahead for the Ireland lay with a “dhá teanga” policy it was pointed out to me rather sternly that this tactic offered few possibilities – a “dhá Theanga” approach might, however, have some merit.
Otherwise, the attitude of most Irish people seemed one of benign indifference tinged with some embarrassment at an inability to answer even the most basic greeting as Gaelige. Indeed, Irish conversation seemed to make sense only between fluent Gaelic speakers or as a cunning ploy used abroad for exchanging private jokes about the idiosyncrasies of other nationalities.
Yet on my hillwalking trips across the Irish Sea, I noticed how ordinary people had proudly embraced Welsh as an expression of national identity. Why were things different in Wales, I wondered? Was Irish independence the culprit? Had it somehow removed our need for the national distinctiveness that is still desired by those nations remaining within the UK and also among the Catholic community of West Belfast, where there is now a thriving Gaeltacht Quarter?
Certainly, one reason any sentimental attachment to the language by Irish people was immediately defenestrated after our independence, was the rash over-enthusiasm of successive governments. We have a long history of rejecting that which is imposed upon us; the Norman Conquest, the Protestant Reformation, the Act of Union, Guinness Light. So compulsory Irish was all wrong for our national psyche and it is only recently that the language has begun to recover from this well-intentioned but dissolute policy.
Indeed, green shoots have sprouted. Gael Scoileanna have been a huge success and increasing numbers of Gael Coláistí teach through Irish at second level. For Leaving Certificate Irish, 40 per cent of marks are awarded for oral competence while TG4 has succeeded in making the language accessible in a way that the worthy, but extravagantly dull, RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta never did. Salutations in Irish are now noticeably more common in daily life; and there was no fuss when the 2013 Hurling League final was broadcast with commentary as Gaelige.
Despite such positives, it is still rare to encounter functional use of Ireland’s first language. I have noticed, for example, that students leaving Gael Coláistí will almost inevitably revert to English once beyond the school gates. And so the old problem remains that while there is much goodwill towards the language, few opportunities exist to speak it.
My own pet solution involves designating the Irish section of our libraries as relaxing bilingual areas with people encouraged to come along, socialise and use whatever cúpla focal they have. Failing this, I’m afraid we must invoke the nuclear option and entirely ban the language. Given the peculiarities of our national psyche, this should ensure that within a short time we would be proudly embracing Irish as ár dteanga féin once again.
