On Losing my Líofacht...

I hope I got this right.....

This morning could have gone better. My alarm didn't go off, I missed Ireland get beaten by Wales, kicking us out of the Rugby World Cup and I was late for college. As I sat on the Luas chowing down a rushed breakfast of coffee and a pastry, a pretty young girl hopped on at Belgard and began a phone conversation in rapid and lyrical Irish. It had been years since I had heard someone speak the language with such fluency. After her phone conversation finished I politely asked her "Cad as tú...?" And we struck up a conversation as Gaeilge for most of the remaining journey. She is a native speaker from Connemara, teaching in Donegal, and mostly converses in Irish when she's at home and when speaking to her friends.

I was born into a family of Gaeilgóirs and spoke in Irish most of my young life, I attended a Gaelscoil until my leaving cert years and I can honestly say I achieved much better academically there than I did in an English speaking school. I landed myself in some of the biggest trouble of my life when I graduated secondary school with just a high B in Irish, in spite of being a native speaker.

There has been some robust debate recently, around the compulsory teaching of Irish, particularly at Leaving Cert level. From what I understand, the pressure mostly comes from parents who had grim experiences of the in school and who don't want to put their children through something similar. There is also the question, especially in today's economy, of how relevant Irish is for school leavers about to enter the jobs market and / or third level education. I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, I agree with people who believe the education system needs to be restructured around core enterprise subjects such as science, business, modern languages, math and liberal arts such as English and art. The fact that we live in a 21st century society that teaches religion as a subject over computing science, is something that needs to be seriously looked at if we are marketing ourselves as a smart economy.

But then there's the other side of me that feels that Irish still has a place in our culture, it has deep roots and emotional attachments that many Irish feel connected to, me included. In case you wondered, I did not have an easy go of it in the Gaelscoil. I have serious reservations about the way we were treated. In primary school I had a ruler taken to the back of my legs and was made to stand in various uncomfortable poses when I was 'bold'. If a teacher overheard us speaking English on school grounds or under the care of a teacher, we were punished by having to write essays on various topics in primary school and in secondary school the punishment was a suspension for the first two offenses and expulsion on the third. You could actually be expelled from school, your academic record permanently tarnished, for speaking English. In my humble estimation... that's nuts.

So as you can see, I'm not looking at this subject through green tinted glasses. The way I was taught in school made me kick back, rebel and generally dislike the language. I disliked it even more when I got to my English leaving cert math class and discovered I didn't know any of the terminology as Bearla. For the longest time I felt that Irish had nothing to offer but diddly eye, twee, archaic stenotypes and trad music... And I hate trad. Years passed and I pretty much lost the fluency I once had. Occasionally I would be asked by people who know I was raised in an Irish speaking home to translate something in Irish, or speak a phrase or two, or help my younger relatives with their homework and I felt ashamed that I had to struggle and eventually wiggle out of it. It was then I slowly came to terms with what I'd lost.

The Irish language is ours. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. It doesn't describe anyone else, but the Irish. Nobody else's history and legends are told in Irish... they are uniquely and entirely ours. When we decide to deny it, when we push back against it because of some idiot teacher or daft system that thinks the stick is a better way of teaching than the carrot, we do ourselves a disservice. When we decide our children aren't going to learn Irish we are denying them their birth right, and by the same token when we scold, chide and beat the love of that language out of our children we are effectively doing the same thing.

I risk annoying a lot of Irish folks out there when I say I agree ( I think I agree) that Irish should not be compulsory for school children, at least at Leaving Cert level. But to those who seek to remove it from the curriculum,  I urge you to think again on deciding not to expose them to it all together. We take for granted something the Basques, Catalonians and countless others have fought for, the right to remember and treasure our own language. Own your language, it's a part of your national and cultural identity, something you can and should pass on to the next generation, something special you can share with them and whisper secrets to each other as Gaeilge as my mother and aunts used to do with me. Níl me ábalta an bronntanas seo a roinnt, le mo leannaí fhéinn, ach tá me chun obair ar mo líofacht on am seo amach.

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I have been researching a little today, looking for an Irish language group in Dublin but haven’t found any yet. If you know of any please leave me a comment below and tell me about it. If I can get enough people interested in NCI I might have a go at setting up a society. I’ll update this post and let you know how I get on.