Marking Time

On my father’s side, I am the first generation of my family to have English as my first language. Both my grandfather and father were born in the Connemara Gaeltacht. Irish was their first language. They learned English later on and became equally fluent in both.

My own level of Irish was always on shaky ground. We rarely spoke Irish at home simply because it was impractical. It was easier to communicate in English as we were all fluent. Our attempts at Irish conversation stumbled and faltered like a wounded bird that couldn’t fly no matter how much we wished it. English was the language of our friends and neighbours, of shops and business, of television and newspapers, and of government.

At school I was enthusiastic about Irish and I did well despite the incomprehensible grammar and a reading list that was almost completely irrelevant to my life. I loved speaking and listening to the language, with its rhythm and flow and its richness of expression.

After I finished school the language was of little use to me. There was no place to use it except among a small number of dedicated enthusiasts for whom speaking and promoting the language was an end in itself rather than the means to expressing something more.

I went to a Gaeltacht summer school once as a teenager and spoke about three sentences of Irish in three weeks despite having reasonable proficiency. There was a ban on speaking English but this was selectively enforced. After all if little Seán or Shiela were kicked out after the first week their parents might be reluctant to cough up the fees again the following summer.

I participated in projects that were designed to expose me to the native population but they all turned out to be ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ jobs put together by the locally-based teacher’s assistants. I guess they were trying to please the blow-in organisers of the school lest they relocate elsewhere if they found the quality of local lore was not up to scratch.

My experience at the Gaeltacht summer school confirmed many of my suspicions that much of the Irish language revival was a sham.

A vibrant authentic Irish speaking culture does exist but it is small and has a negligible impact on mainstream Irish society. Most of us treat the language as if it were the Waterford Crystal that we keep in the sitting room cabinet only to be wheeled out for show on special occasions. For most of of us our experience of Irish is limited to the mandatory ‘cúpla focal’ at the start of any official function before we revert quickly to the comfort of English.

‘Tá an áthas orm an corn seo a glacadh’ are the first words of every acceptance speech on winning a GAA competition yet they are rarely followed by a second sentence of Irish. John Connolly’s famous speech given when Galway won their first all-Ireland hurling title in 1980 is more noteworthy for the fact that it was given in Irish than for the fact that it was the first time that the McCarthy cup had been wrenched from the grip of Leinster and Munster. Indeed the passion and power of that speech seemed to hint at something deeper. Irish seemed more capable of expressing the occasion than English would have been. It was a uniquely Irish event and required the native language to describe it accurately.

The greatest tragedy resulting from the loss of the Irish language is that we have no real sense of what we have lost. A language is more than just a means of communication. Embedded within in it is the historical and geographical information of the community that gives it life. Just as the eskimos have a multitude of words to describe snow the Irish language contains within in it many subtleties that cannot be translated precisely into English.

We have adapted and corrupted the English language to our own ends as we seek to express our own identity but it hasn’t quite done the trick. There is still something missing. The language won’t bend far enough for us. Perhaps the identity crisis we as a nation feel at times can be attributed to this intangible loss. We struggle to find words to express ourselves. It seems strange but we miss something that we never really had.

We have a love-hate relationship with Irish. We love the fact that we have a language of our own, unique, rich and full of history but we also hate it because it is a reminder of our own failings. The fact that we have failed to revive the language or at least halt the decline after we achieved independence from Britain affects us deeply. Whenever we are exposed to the language we are emotionally torn. We feel pride in the language but shame and frustration at our lack of ability to speak it. We wish it would just go away.

The appropriation of the language and symbols of Ireland by militant republicanism is another sorry saga. It is hard to believe that before the success of the Irish soccer team in the late eighties and early nineties, you might be considered a terrorist sympathiser if you displayed an Irish flag other than at an official event. The Irish language was similiarly tarnished albeit to a lesser degree. Irish society was so unsure and lacking in self confidence that it did little to dissuade this inaccurate perception. We were happy to surrender our identity to extremists. We felt that we had no further use for it.

The English language has had many benefits for the Irish. It has given us a headstart in accessing and understanding Britain and America. However the adoption of English as our first language has left our culture more open to British and American influences, influences that are very powerful and difficult to resist. Countries whose first language is not English view American TV and film through the filter of subtitles and overdubs. This gives them a layer of protection that we do not have. They are consciously aware that they are observing another culture. We have no such protection and are therefore more open and uncritical of these influences and often assimilate them subconciously.

We blame the education system for failing to revive the language but it is in the broader society that the fault lies. The problem is not the imposition of compulsory Irish. The problem is that there are so few places to use the langauge once we have learnt it. There is no incentive.

The Irish requirements for entry into the civil service are a sham. There is no point in having an entry requirement for Irish if there is no requirement to use the language on the job. A major contribution to the decline in Irish in Gaeltacht areas has been the fact that almost all dealings that the Irish speaker must conduct with the state must be done through English. English is viewed by the Irish speaker as the official language of government. This is a huge demotivating factor.

We need to get serious about reviving the language or else forget about it. Either we do the job properly or we abandon it to the historians and hobbyists. At the moment we fall between two stools and nobody is happy. Those who are passionate about the language are short-changed by a state system that only makes a token effort to fulfill their wishes - following the letter rather than the spirit of revivalism - while the rest of us feel we are compromised by the imposition of a useless language upon us.

Personally I think that it’s worth the effort. A language is one of the core attributes of a nation’s identity and without it a nation is less than it could be. This applies even more in the Irish case where our native language contains embedded within it much of our history and traditions, most of which will be forgotten forever with the death of the language.

Mark Waters marked time at 9:01 pm on December 3rd, 2003 .

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