Anna Carey returns to the Irish college she attended in her teens and finds that little has changed - speaking the language gets easier the more you do it, and the céilí is still the highpoint of the week
For more than 40 years now, going to the Gaeltacht for three weeks has been a summer ritual for Irish teenagers. It has become a rite of passage, albeit one that's hard to explain to non-Irish friends. Yes, you find yourself saying to an incredulous American or English chum, I voluntarily went to the middle of nowhere to spend three weeks sleeping on an uncomfortable bunk bed, eating terrible food, playing sports, singing songs about mad goats and speaking another language. Badly. Everyone does it. It's fun! Except for the having to play sports bit, of course. And the food - a vegetarian in my house at a west Cork coláiste was given plain cooked pasta for more than one meal. And the mad Bean an Tí (same coláiste) who kept poteen in the hot press.
But the rest was pretty good. Many people have fond memories of their Gaeltacht days. "I loved it," says musician Tim O'Donovan of the electropop band Neosupervital, who also drums with Bell X1. "Nobody knew you; you knew nobody. You could meet folks from - gasp - outside Dublin. There were activities like kayaking that you hadn't tried before, and kayaking in Irish was even more fun." And speaking of Irish, most of us did actually grow to like speaking "as Gaeilge" after a while.
But that was a simpler age. Do the sophisticated, glossy teens of today, with their vast consumer power and their mobiles, still hanker to kayak while speaking their native language (or at least do better in their Leaving Cert Irish exams)? To find out, I've returned, with some trepidation, to Coláiste Lurgan in Indreabhán, Co Galway, where I spent three weeks as a "cinnire" (a sort of prefect) during the summer I turned 17. When I first entered Lurgan in July 1992, most of its current students were toddlers.
And yet, 13 years later, the rambling premises - a hall flanked by a corridor of classrooms, with tarmac games courts on both sides - hasn't changed much, although a spanking new complex is planned.
Happily, the attitudes of the students haven't changed much either. Those I chat with say their main reason for going was "the craic", although those who have the Leaving Cert coming up next year admit that the Irish exam has something to do with it. But they all seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves - many are on their third or fourth summer at the coláiste, and one particularly devoted student attended not one but two courses last summer.
They all enjoy the wide variety of activities on offer - drama, bike rides, art and kayaking, as well as the traditional sporting tournaments. And they acknowledge that there are some people who just don't engage with the course. "There are a few moaners who don't speak Irish," says 17-year-old Aoife Gorey. "But they just don't give it a chance."
However, many of the students have grown to love speaking as Gaeilge. "Before I came here, my Irish was terrible," says Kelly Porter (17). "I used to hate Irish at school, but now I really love it."
They all agree that their Irish has improved greatly. "You start thinking in Irish, which is really weird," says Niall O'Donoghue (17). Gorey agrees. "I rang home the other day and I couldn't stop speaking Irish," she says. And Porter says that once she wrote a letter home, "and later my mum told me that half of it was in Irish. I didn't even notice when I was writing it." The kids are united in their dislike of the way Irish is taught in schools, and find the Coláiste Lurgan approach to Irish classes much more helpful. I can't help agreeing with them.
When I sit in on a class, the teacher is using Powerpoint projections to accompany the Lurgan work book. This is an appealing and well-designed volume, which cleverly uses photos and puzzles to teach vocabulary and grammar, a subject often neglected in school Irish classes. The muinteór speaks as Gaelige throughout the class, carefully making sure the students understand what she's saying, getting them to explain new vocabulary in their own (Irish) words. While some students do have to resort to (highly amusing) mime, at the end they all understand what's going on, and are actively participating in class.
"It's much easier to learn when everything is through Irish," says Niall. "I think people have a bad impression of Irish because of the way it's usually taught in school. They don't focus on spoken Irish at all in school - there's no interaction." Also, unlike school, the students have the chance to immediately use what they've learned in class.
"You go back to your house and everyone's using the words they learned that day," says cinnire Eamonn MacManus. In fact, they all say that they wish they had more opportunities to speak Irish in their daily lives. "If you speak Irish back at school, people just laugh," says Porter. "People don't see a point in speaking Irish."
The concept of Irish as a living, modern language is hugely important to Coláiste Lurgan, according to coláiste chief Micheál Ó Foighil. "We measure the success of a 'cuirse Gaeilge' by the social interaction - when we hear the students just talking as Gaeilge naturally among themselves," he says.
Furthering this idea of a dynamic Irish-speaking community, the Coláiste has embarked on a highly successful partnership with Goal, funding youth-centred community projects in Kosovo and Kenya. It's a long way from the stereotype of Irish as an insular language with no place in the wider world.
But for some summer college veterans, that stereotype was a reality. While my Gaeltacht experiences were more or less positive, others have less rosy memories. Writer Paul Murray, for one, who attended a very strict summer college in Galway. "It didn't have any truck with the more whimsical aspects of the Irish college experience, such as the Bean an Tí, and formative romantic experiences," he says.
"Its role was the furtherance of the Irish language, and, if there was time left over, the toppling of the State and creation of a united Ireland. Every morning we got up at dawn to march out to the yard to watch the raising of the tricolour and sing the national anthem - I'm not making this up. We went to bed at, I believe, eight o'clock."
Murray isn't quite sure why his 15-year-old self chose to go there. "I cannot for the life of me imagine what possessed me to enlist [ in that college]," he says." It must have been some masochistic phase of adolescence. Even my parents, who ordinarily make the Amish look like so many Cheeches and Chongs, thought it sounded like a bummer. And it was."
Céilís were one of the elements of coláiste life that were enjoyed by almost everyone, and still are. Coláiste Lurgan also holds regular talent competitions and discos in the evenings these days, but the céilís still take place and, according to the students, are still popular. "Everyone gets up and dances," says Aoife Gorey. "No one cares whether they look stupid or not. We even had a pyjama céilí, where everyone came in pyjamas."
Even Paul Murray has fond memories of the céilí in the coláiste he attended. "There was one part of the dance in particular, the luascadh, where you swing your partner around, that I especially enjoyed," he recalls wistfully. "I would swing them as fast as I could - you could really get some speed up if your partner was into it. Then inevitably I accidentally let someone go mid-luascadh. After that I was put in the remedial céilí class, where a very beautiful cinnere laboured selflessly but, in the end, fruitlessly, to teach me basic non-fatal céilí moves."
There'll be no céilí moves of any kind tonight in coláiste Lurgan - it's the weekly disco - so I take my leave. As Gaeilge, of course, as (interviews apart) I've been speaking Irish all day, for the first time since I did the Leaving in 1993. And I've been enjoying it, too, even though I find myself using German prepositions all the time; I studied German in college and apparently all that Kafka and Brecht filled up the space in my brain devoted to non-English languages.
What surprises me, however, is how quickly my Irish comes back - after a few hours I'm spontaneously using words I thought I'd long forgotten. And just like the Lurgan students, I find myself wishing I had more opportunities to use Gaeilge in my daily life. If spending just one day in an Irish-speaking environment can restore the Irish of someone who hasn't spoken it for 12 years (and who devoted the first four of those years to reading, writing and speaking in a totally different second language) surely it has to be having a good effect on our impressionable youth. Anyone for a rousing chorus of An Poc Ar Buile?