You can't jog to a sean nos song. This isn't an attempt to coin a trendy proverb about the relationship between the modern and the traditional in Ireland. It is literally the case. If you run on the treadmill in one of those gyms where you get a little individual TV set, and you switch the TV to the RTE programme-information picture that plays the output of Raidio na Gaeltachta, you will find that it can't be done. It is easy to run to whatever is pounding out on MTV. But Irish traditional song is too spacious and slow and intricate to fit the rhythms of contemporary urban culture. Its rhythms are from another world.
To its continuing cost, the Irish language itself is associated with that other world. "The Gaeltacht" is thought of as a pre-modern place - charming or hateful according to taste, but certainly not up-to-date. In up-to-date Ireland people do not grow potatoes or eat dulse or know how to clean a mackerel. They do not live in cottages or small bungalows in large landscapes. They live in brick semi-detacheds with PVC dormer windows, with en suite bathrooms and guest WCs. Their housing estates are pathetically named as if they were in England. Tudor this and that. Grange the other. Ridings. Downs. Coppices. It's pathetic, but that's what happens when all your own names for those things are hidden in the Irish language.
Those clean, bright, brand-new housing estates are where modern young Irish couples want to start off their families. Near jobs and schools and shopping centres. And in the company of neighbours who are of much the same age and have much the same income. The values and the aspirations of the young people contemplating buying a house on the new estate called Castle Riada, near Lucan, for example, are probably very similar. Two hundred of the houses have been sold already, all to first-time buyers. Three bedrooms; gas central heating; fully-fitted kitchen, and a price of about £90,000. This ideal has easily supplanted the little grey home in the west.
Probably the thing the young couples who are the most characteristic buyers want is a safe environment in which to rear the children who will fill the bedrooms. This estate is designed for safety. Houses are grouped around a series of cul-de-sacs. This design - here we go again - is called the "Surrey style". There with no footpaths or dividing front walls. The idea is that each cul-de-sac will be a little community.
There is a chance that one of the cul-de-sacs will have an extra dimension to the sense of a community based on shared values. Because one of them might - just might - be made up of people who are interested in living their ordinary lives through Irish. The idea is very simple. The next batch of houses will be marketed from about the beginning of September. A group of Irish language lovers called Pobal Mha Life have got the builders and auctioneers to agree to keep one cul-de-sac for Irish-speakers. They're publicising this at the moment as best they can in the hope of reaching maybe 10 or 20 individuals or couples who want to buy one of these houses and also want Irish speaking neighbours. Hamilton Osborne King will keep the option of a dedicated cul-de-sac open for a few weeks. It might work. There's no way of finding out except to try it. If this idea does become a reality, it will represent a wonderful new liaison between the ancient language and a modern way of Irish living. There is no going back to the old communities. The groves and crescents and lawns of the housing estates that surround every town and city in the country are our clachans now. That's where the Irish men and women of the future are growing up, in a welter of tricycles and piling into a Mammy's car for a special treat at McDonald's, and chaotic soccer games on the little patches of green. It isn't possible to reasonably propose that these suburbs should become generally Irish-speaking. But there's no reason why Irish shouldn't be a familiar, unremarked sound.
In Lucan, for example, there's a naionra, and soon there'll be a bun-scoil and a meanscoil lanGhaeilge. Why wouldn't Irish escape a bit into after-school life? If there were such a thing as a neigbourhood where all the children were used to Irish in their homes and between their homes, as well as school, why wouldn't it seem a natural thing for a young person to sometimes speak Irish? And if some of those young people continued it on to the households they'll construct themselves, might that not keep the language alive in a part of the Irish landscape from which nothing much was hoped?
Of course, I'm getting wildly ahead of myself. There isn't even one firm inquiry for a house in the Irish-speaking enclave. The real peril the Irish language is in is so painful to contemplate that one plunges into fantasy to escape the sight. The probability is, I have to admit to myself, that there won't be five, never mind 25 individuals or couples who are in the market for a house like the Castle Riada ones, and who will also want to live in an Irish-speaking ambiance. Lots of people would probably like to have Irish-speaking neighbours for the same kind of reasons lots of people want to send their children to Irish-speaking schools, i.e. that anyone who has the heart and soul to respond to the intangible value of Irish has something extra to them - is in some small way special. But the country probably isn't turning out enough young people confident enough of their language skills, and committed enough to making use of them, to fill this one small corner.
Even though a relaxed bilingualism has come to seem so natural a part of Irish life. I was brought to an evening party somewhere up past Spiddal recently. The house was a perfectly preserved traditional cottage, but at the back, a wonderful glass and wood extension had been made around a little garden of flagstones and high hedges. They were barbecuing salmon, and filling plates with wonderful breads and salads and oysters and crab and cream sponges jammy with berries. All the smart young people were standing around drinking wine and talking their heads off. In Irish and English and both.
The next night I was in north Donegal, in a pub where a singer-accordionist was churning out industrial quantities of country-and-western. The conversations around me - jokes, slagging, arguments - were in Irish and English and both. This is how things have evolved. You would think that that Gaeltacht and former-Gaeltacht bilingualism would be easier to transplant to suburbia than "good" Irish. You would think the stylishness of T na G would help to make Irish cool enough for city kids who are at Irish schools anyway. You would think that it is not completely crazy to believe that some summer night around the barbecue, the same rich and beautiful mixture might be heard in Lucan. That the rhythms of jogging and sean nos os singing would be in harmony.
If anyone reading this is interested, the telephone numbers of the Pobal people promoting the idea are : Dublin 4964859 and Dublin 2886350. I'll check with them at the end of September to see what happened. If nothing happens, I won't depress you by telling you. But if there's good news - I'll trumpet it.