Item one: a head. Item two: a parapet. Take item one, and raise it above item two. And then get it blown off. How? As follows.
The forthcoming report on compulsory Irish by Adrian Kenny claims what most of us have known for years - that the entire programme has been a complete disaster. Senator Joe O'Toole, who wrote the foreword, declares with a certain relish that this judgment will get the zealots out of the woodwork when it appears next moth.
But I can't wait that long! So here goes.
Why does the Irish restoration lobby contain so many hysterical, snarling, peevish, misanthropic cranks? Why do they react to an observation which most people privately agree with - that the language is dead - as if you had told them their mother had serviced Palmerston 1st XV on her wedding night?
And now, since my head's nicely in the line of fire, I may as well get good value for it: so steady there, An tUasal snipéir, draw in your breath, hold it and then squeeze the trigger gently as I ask the next question: Why do a disproportionate number of people whose names are in Irish seem so desperately and endlessly unhappy?
A lawyer once told me that people with names in Irish are the most implacably litigious clients. Don't take his word for it, or mine. Just look at the numbers of letters of complaint that are published on this page from people whose names take the Irish form. It is almost as if everything in life causes them to utter epistolary scowls.
Unhappy people
So: are many deeply unhappy people drawn to the language revival movement not just because they're unhappy, but because they cherish their unhappiness as a badge of identity? After all, nothing will intensify that unhappiness or reaffirm that identity all the more deeply than attachment to a doomed cause.
Of course they could join the Flat Earth Society, or the Society for the Promotion of Vegetarian Cats, or the Society for the Abolition of Gravity. But maybe it's because those societies are more likely to have their ambitions realised that the glums reject them. What the gnashing gloomies really seek is failure: the certainty of irredeemable, all-consuming disappointment, and in the midst of all that disappointment, they may then - thank God - feel free to hate those whom they blame for that disappointment.
So many to hate
And this is simply marvellous, because there are so many people to hate. The English, to start with. Eight hundred years of oppression and genocide and all that. And the West Brits, and the unionists and the Castle Catholics and Daniel O'Connell and the British army and Parnell and Fine Gael and the Blueshirts and the Bishops - but ah, most of all, journalists who say (in English) that the Irish language as a spoken vernacular is all but dead, and that money being on spent on its universal promotion is wasted, as indeed are the millions that have gone into what was once TnaG, which was then rebranded as TG4 but was always, from its very inception, TdeLorean.
Journalists? No, not really. Journalist, actually. This one. Is mise. And nothing compares to the letters of vitriol that pour in when I say that the language is just about dead. Nothing. Sheer unmitigated hatred, snarled and incoherent rage fill their pages, as if every single dark suspicion that their writers have ever possessed about human nature is vindicated in my observation that the Irish language is a stiff. There! I told you so! Traitors, traitors, everywhere, and most especially in that. . .that. . .so-called "Irishman's Diary". Ha! "West Brit Diary" more like!
Here follows the truth. The language is laid out on a slab, and attempts to revive it by compulsion have merely squandered vast treasuries, and ruined countless thousands of lives. How many working-class children have left school almost uneducated because of the time and the resources wasted on the vain but often violent attempts to drum Irish into their brains?
What they needed from school was the ability to learn good basic English and mathematics. What they got was neither, but an abiding and pathological aversion to a language they would never ever speak, either in their classrooms, their housing estates here, or where they ended up: the dole queues in England.
Why is this simple, demonstrable truth likely to be greeted with frothing howls of hatred, most especially from people who spell their names with fadas? Weather forecasters are not accused of anti-Irish meteorological racism when they say that the weather has been appalling and won't get any better. So why are people who say the same about the Irish language accused of being linguistic imperialists and cultural fascists, usually in voices that are spitting gall and hatred?
Bilious rants
Many people love the Irish language, and that is good; and clearly this Diary is not about them. People who truly loved the language would want to spare it the indignity of it being coerced into the mouths of the unwilling. Yet some people - a disconcertingly large number, I must say, to judge from the bilious rants I get when I touch upon this subject - don't love Irish so much as hate those who don't agree with their world-view, as measured by the Irish language.
And frankly, that's the kind of person I like to be hated by most of all. By the way, what's that on the floor there? Nothing: just me head. Or, rather, as we Gaeilgeoirí say, mo cheann.