A few weeks ago I was standing in a Centra deciding between a Double Decker and a Marathon bar – I’m an 80s kid, can’t bear to call them Sni*kers – minding my own business.
As I reached for a Double Decker, the thinking woman’s chocolate bar is how I justify it, a man approached, speaking Irish. To my surprise, he seemed to be speaking Irish to me. It was disorienting. This stranger was addressing me in the language of my own country but he might as well have been speaking Icelandic, for all I understood.
It was disorienting for another reason. It emerged, when he began speaking English, that I had maybe kissed this person in Irish college. Blushing by the confectionery aisle, having a sort of out of body experience where I was transported back to Scoil na nÓg, in Glanmire, Cork when I was 12 or 13, he seemed to be suggesting that I was his first girlfriend.
We stood there, two middle-aged people, looking back in time. Me reminiscing about how I went Scoil na nÓg, which his parents ran, four summers in a row, travelling from Dublin on my own on the train, and how I managed to lose my return train ticket every single year.
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Him, telling me where his siblings were now and how his wife had just given birth to their first baby. As I looked at him, something in his twinkly blue eyes, jogged my memory. I suddenly had a visceral reminder that I had really – and I mean really – fancied this person at one point back in the day. I blushed deeper by the chocolate bars. We said our slán go fóills. I stood there, a bit shook.
Funnily enough, it was thinking about my relationship with the Irish language that shook me more than the mortification of a surprise encounter with someone I may once have snuck up a hill and behind some blackberry bushes to shift four decades previously.
I felt embarrassed that I didn’t understand what he’d been saying to me when he first approached. And I realised that, since watching An Cailín Ciúin – three times now and counting – I’d been feeling a sort of unarticulated, low grade sadness about my lack of engagement with the Irish language. I must have been able to speak it once, playing swingball and learning Irish songs in Glanmire, but I’d be hard pressed to have a decent conversation with anybody as Gaeilge now.
Along with the sadness, there has arrived a sort of hope. Two American newspapers have both published fantastic articles recently about the An Cailín Ciúin-effect on the Irish language. As one commentator wrote, the international plaudits including the Oscar nomination for that movie “has stirred the already deep sense of national pride among Irish people, whether they speak the language or not”.
Speaking to the New York Times Colm Bairéad, director of An Cailín Ciúin, got to the heart of this pride. “The language is almost like the central character of our film, you know, it’s been silenced over many years. There’s something quite appropriate about the fact that the year where we have the most nominations in our history, our language is also part of that.”
Watching Irish actors on the Bafta red carpet last week, it occurred to me that when it comes to the Irish language we are all either Brendan Gleeson, Paul Mescal or Colin Farrell. Gleeson chatted away fluently to the TG4 reporter, having coincidentally been taught Irish by Colm Bairéad’s dad while training to be a teacher. Standing beside him, fellow The Banshees of Inisherin castmate Farrell backed away from the prospect of an interview seemingly terrified by the prospect of having to speak about the film in his native tongue.
“Shame on me,” you can hear Farrell saying off-camera and a lot of us felt his pain. Then there was Normal People and Aftersun’s Paul Mescal who gamely took on the challenge, carrying off a great chat in his rusty school Irish. It was impressive, even if he reverted to hybrid English-Irish at certain points, “agus, yeah”, and ran out of steam completely at the end when asked would he ever star in an Irish language film: “Absolutely” he said in the clip which inevitably went viral.
When I asked one of my Irish language speaking friends about this latest possible revival, he said being an Irish speaker in a mostly non-Irish speaking Ireland, he had felt “othered” in the past. Interestingly, he felt this new warmth towards the language was an indication of us, as a nation, liking ourselves more.
“I always felt there was another Ireland that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to be part of, but as I grew older I realised this wasn’t true. There was an apologetic Ireland when it came to our language, but we should not be apologising for who we are,” he said.
Our exchange reminded me that I once wrote a column describing him as an “ardent Gaeilgeoir”. He took me to task for it afterwards.
“We are always described as ardent, strident, committed...” he said. But Irish speakers don’t need an extra adjective, certainly not one that makes them sound fanatical.
In an attempt to become more Gleeson than Farrell, or even a bit more Mescal, I went searching for classes online.
“Would you like to improve your Irish in a fun, interactive class with learners from around the world?” one of the websites asked.
“Why, yes, I found myself thinking. Yes I very much would.”
What’s the Irish for bandwagon? Because it appears I am about to jump on it. Absolutely, agus yeah.
Seachtain na Gaeilge starts today