There was a certain confirmation in hearing my own accent on a movie screen. I'm sure the citizens of Dublin are blase about all the attention they get, but for those of us from the more exotic reaches of the country, it's still quite a thrill. To hear people from Clones and Killeshandra in Dolby stereo is a new, special and valuable thing. And so my admiration for Neil Jordan's faithful film of The Butcher Boy is accompanied by a certain tribal pride. It's probably a Northern thing. It usually is.
And I wasn't going to be easily pleased by this film either. Pat McCabe's book had been pitch perfect in every way and it would have been more than understandable if the movie had been a letdown. But it wasn't. It was spot-on. All references to bogmen, boney arses and custard creams were executed with accuracy and skill, and those accents emerged from the screen as the very same voices I hear in my head whenever I dwell in that extraordinary book. I had a definite idea about Francie Brady too and Eamonn Owens was it. If I had met that young man two years ago on a street in Clones I'd have said good man Francie Brady, is it yourself?
I'm not from Clones or Killeshandra - but near enough. In Fermanagh we have a way of talking that is part direct translation from the Irish, part Elizabethan English and part Scots (although not to the same degree as in more northern parts of Ulster.) The accents in my part of the world are soft and guttural and they go with the climate. We're inclined to mumble lots of cover-all remarks like "ah now" and "don't be talkin'" and many people get by without ever really saying much else. It's a way of talking that sings in a gentle muttering way and if we ever get around to huge passages of speech (people reading the lesson or schoolboys squaring up to each other in the yard) we can appear quite mad - exactly like Francie Brady in Algernon Carruthers mode.
I'm told that my own accent has mutated a bit over the years and I'm sure that's true. Firstly, I'm too long away from the source and secondly, I've done far too much talking out loud. It's quite unnatural for someone from my part of the world to speak to the extent that I do - radio blether etc. If it wasn't for the job I don't think I'd ever say very much at all apart from "surely". To be honest, I'll probably not say a word between now and seven o'clock on Monday night when I am obliged to address the microphone in some form of partially comprehensible Hiberno-English. I might sound like a thorough Fermanagh man to you - but in my own heart I know I've lost a part of it. Maybe my Francie Brady imitations will restore it. I hope so.
Of course some of my contemporaries were quite happy to lose their accents. After two days in some university in England, they all started talking like Alex Higgins and immediately felt themselves somehow impressive. In later years I noticed how the newly promoted suits seemed to learn their new inflections on the Belfast to Heathrow shuttle. "I'm orf to Lahn-dahn in the maw-ning."
The result is a whole race of northern Eliza Doolittles who only lapse into the vernacular in moments of crisis. I've seen it happen. I've even been on the receiving end of one of these bad-tempered regressions and I must say that it was a most entertaining experience - quite spectacular in fact. Perhaps it is instinct which teaches us that certain expressions and expletives just cannot work with the vowels displaced. Try it yourself in a quiet moment. I'm telling you - it doesn't work.
My introduction to the Dublin accent was the Dubliners singing songs like The Monto. Imagine how disconcerting it was for me to discover years later that not everyone in Dublin spoke like Ronnie Drew. Much as I expected the streets to be alive with luv-e-lee roi-ip peee-chess I found that I kept overhearing some other strange hybrid that I couldn't quite place. I was eventually informed that it was the DART accent - a bizarre system of pronunciation that I'm finding particularly difficult to mimic. Perhaps some correspondents to you letters' page might enlighten me further on this? What are its origins? When was it first discovered? Where do those vowels come from? Is it hard on the vocal chords or is it just me?
I'm hardly qualified to comment further on the mysterious DART accent, but as for the mid-Irish Sea accent as spoken on the Belfast-Heathrow shuttle, I have a few theories. Maybe these people are striving for some platonic ideal? Maybe like Swift they desire a uniformed system for the pronunciation of English words? Maybe like Swift they feel that most regional accents are offensive and that the Irish accent makes the speaker "ridiculed and despised". I wouldn't put it past some of the characters I have in mind. The last thing they would want is to be ridiculed. Maybe the Shuttlers are simply striving for a new accent so that they can give orders and command respect? It's the oldest trick in the book after all. The unfortunate thing, however, is that it just makes them sound as daft as a brush.
The poet and critic Tom Paulin in his essay A New Look At The Language Question says that the language we speak in the North is in a state of anarchy. It is "a language which lives a type of romantic, unfettered existence - no dictionary accommodates it, no academy regulates it, no common legislative body speaks it, and no national newspaper guards it". And that means I'm anarchist - all the more bizarre that I was permitted to talk in my own voice on the BBC for several years. Come to think of it, a university careers advisor (with an English accent) didn't think it likely that I would get any broadcasting work at all with an accent like mine. And he was only wrong up to a point. Anyway, Swift would not have approved of it, even if I'd put on what Francie Brady calls his telly voice.
What a wonderful world it will be when we all sound the same. When you cannot tell one person from another, cannot distinguish one voice on the radio from another, cannot form the simplest of relationships with people because we'll all sound like we tumbled out of some finishing school in the mid-Atlantic or the mid-Irish Sea. It might never happen of course, but there are forces out there which are certainly trying very hard to obliterate all variety. Tom Paulin has described our anarchic language (Francie Brady's language) as being "like some strange creature of the open air, it exists simply as Geist or spirit". In that case will Mr McCabe, Mr Jordan and Mr Owens go straight to the top of the class. They have captured that spirit with extraordinary and intoxicating skill. They should be rewarded handsomely with as many Flash Bars as they can eat.
John Kelly is a writer and broadcaster