Lá Fhéile Phádraig: Is Gaelic dead?

A happy St. Patrick’s Day to Hot Air readers, or Lá Fhéile Phádraig, as the Irish call it — or would, if they spoke Irish. Being a poor student of the ancient tongue myself, I read Manchán Magan’s essay in the LA Times today about his travails in attempting to use Irish in Ireland with some sadness and understanding. Despite generations of compulsory education in the nation’s first official language, or perhaps because of it, the Irish seem unwilling to make this part of their heritage a part of their current lives:

Gaelic — or irish, as we call it here — is the first official language of Ireland. (English is second.) And 41% of the population claim to speak it. But could that be true? To put it to the test, I set off across Ireland for three weeks in the summer of 2006 with one self-imposed handicap — to never utter a word of English.

I chose Dublin as a starting point. The sales assistant in the first shop I went to said, “Would you speak English maybe?” I tried repeating my request using the simplest schoolroom Irish that he must have learned during the 10 years of compulsory Irish that every schoolchild undergoes. “Do you speak English?” he asked again in a cold, threatening tone. Sea (pronounced “sha”), I affirmed, and nodded meekly. “I’m not talking to you any more,” he said, covering his ears. “Go away!”

I knew the journey was going to be difficult, just not this difficult. Language experts claim that the figure of fluent Irish speakers is closer to 3% than the aspirational 41% who tick the language box on the census, and most of them are concentrated on the western seaboard, in remote, inaccessible areas. What I had not factored for was the animosity. Part of it, I felt, stemmed from guilt. We feel inadequate that we cannot speak our own language.

I decided to visit Dublin’s tourist office, which, presumably, was accustomed to dealing with different languages. The man at the counter looked at me quizzically when I inquired about a city tour. “Huh?” he said, his eyes widening. I repeated myself.

“You don’t speak English, do you?” he asked coldly. I was already beginning to hate this moment — the point at which the fear and frustration spread across a person’s face. I asked if there was any other language I could use, and they pointed to a list of seven flags on the wall representing the languages they dealt in. To be honest, I could speak four of them, but I had promised myself not to, not unless it was absolutely necessary.

As Magan discovers, the language itself has its burden of politics and culture. For generations, it served as a badge of shame — identifying its speakers as backwards, unsophisticated, and hopeless, or at least it did among those who thought themselves superior for having left it behind. That kind of baggage doesn’t disappear overnight. The compulsory education didn’t do anything to address that, nor did it give the language any kind of relevancy in a nation that already spoke one language from border to border: English.

I had just begun to study the language when I traveled to Ireland for the first (and so far only) time in 2001. Having just begun instruction with Gaeltacht Minnesota, a lovely local group of volunteer instructors, I wanted to find some Gaeilge resources. I found a newspaper as Gaeilge in a convenience story in Kilkenny and bought it while chatting with the young clerk. When she saw the paper, she asked me if I spoke Irish (being quite obviously American), and I told her I had just begun learning it. Her reply? “Ah, why bother?”

And it seemed many shared that sentiment across Ireland. All of the signs in the country are in both languages, but apart from the tourist trinkets one could buy, hardly a word of Irish could be heard in Dublin or any of the cities. On the western seaboard, as Magan notes, the language felt a little closer to life, but still only made an occasional appearance. We missed the gaeltachts of Connemara during our vacation, where the people use it as a community language, but that use hasn’t spread outside of the enclaves.

Oddly, this should be an era where the language thrives. Ireland pressed for and received official EU recognition for Irish as an official language of the union. Web sites teaching the language flourish, and global interest in it continues to grow. More and more musicians use the language not just to sing traditional Irish songs, but to write contemporary music with contemporary lyrics. Its beauty remains undimmed, even if still mostly unrecognized.

Hopefully, Magan’s journey will inspire more to actually use the language, in Ireland and abroad. Despite the open hostility he found in Dublin, the rest of the country appeared more open to his use of Irish, if no less dumbfounded. Language speaks more than just conversation; it carries the history of a culture in its structure and syntax. Its loss would mean so much more than just the disappearance of a few quaint road signs along the countryside.