DO you have the cúpla focal?
To be honest isn’t that just what the vast majority of us have? Just a few scattered words of Irish. A few halting sentences.
The Irish language was back in the headlines recently over the bizarre controversy as to whether the Taoiseach had or had not called Mary Lou McDonald a liar when he spoke in the Dáil in Irish.
It is nothing but ironic that the controversy about the language centres around nobody being sure what the words he spoke meant.
Our relationship with the language is complex to say the least. People hate it because of how they were taught it and then regret not being able to speak it.
Those of us who are Irish, but from outside the island, see it as some kind of holy grail of Irishness that we will never find. Our missing language, the fault line in who we are. It’s not, though, is it, as straightforward as that?
Irish is, as far as a non-speaker can tell, a beautiful language.
I’ve only read Irish literature in translation but it has about it a definite quality of itself.
There is a way of expression that is not rooted in English. There is a rhythm that is not English.
There is a way of looking at the world that exists only within that language.
It is a valuable thing. Something we should treasure. Something of our culture that should be preserved.
If the works that I have read are that beautiful in translation I can only imagine what they must be like in the original.
Yet, living here in Ireland the language can often raise a weary sigh.
Of course I do not share the instinctive recoil against the language that those who were badly taught it at school feel. That passes me by.
What I do pick up on though is the tiresome superiority that so many who champion the language express.
There seems to be an unavoidable assertion that they are, you know, simply more Irish than the rest of us. Or, at least, a superior Irish.
Now there does seem to be some debate as to why we do not have our language, at least in an everyday way for the majority, when other peoples still have.
Why, for instance, is Welsh far more of a living language than Irish? The Welsh too were colonised by the English, were they not?
Some commentators have, indeed, asserted that we didn’t lose the language so much as give it up. We surrendered it.
As with all things the truth is in there somewhere. When I think of my own family I can see some kind of Irish truth anyway.
My mother’s people, including the grandfather who reared her, were landless labourers.
They lived a kind of itinerant life moving around areas west of Cork city taking on seasonal work and a seasonal cottage.
They lived a precarious life. The idea that these people are somehow to blame for surrendering a language that was by all accounts associated with poverty, that was not the language of prosperity, has always seemed to me a handy way for the educationally superior to assert, well, their superiority.
The wonderful Irish poet Michael Hartnett, who wrote in both Irish and English, majestically described English, whilst promising henceforth to only write in Irish, as the perfect language to sell pigs in.
It is a brilliant put down by a brilliant writer. Michael Hartnett is my favourite Irish poet.
Yet, the reality, away from the pages of poetry, is that many people’s lives, like my family’s, were such that the necessity to sell pigs, or spuds or cows or anything, trumped revelling in the beauties of a language.
Those who have never had to sell pigs just to feed themselves shouldn’t sit in judgement on those who did.
Are those of us who never even got to experience the brutal dullness of educational Irish because our families had to emigrate somehow lesser Irish because of that?
Because the question I always want to ask about Irish emigration is not why did my family have to leave but why were yours able to stay?
Is it not the truth that our leaving facilitated your staying?
It’s a lovely language Irish. I wish I could speak it. I dearly wish I could read it. But I’m not going to be looked down upon because I can’t.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
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