IN A CHIP SHOP in Killybegs last week, the young one behind the counter asked me if I was on holidays in the area. So I told her yes and no: that it was a working holiday, because I was doing an Irish course out in Glencolmcille.
At which news she paused just long enough to sprinkle salt and vinegar on the question that was coming. And then, in a withering Donegal accent, she said: “Why?” If the baldness of the query hadn’t caught me off balance, I might have explained that, well, for good or bad, I thought Irish was part of what we are. That ever since scraping a Leaving Cert pass in it, I had considered the language unfinished business: to which I would return one day. I might have added that, mainly by geographic accident, my children were now attending Gaelscoil and I felt the need to be supportive.
And I might even have suggested facetiously that the comedian Des Bishop had shamed me into it by demonstrating how a mere Yank could achieve fluency in Irish from scratch. But I didn’t say any of these things, because the obvious depth of the questioner’s feelings had thrown me. “You’re not an enthusiast for the language, so?” was all I could manage. She gave me my fish and chips and said, even more witheringly: “You couldn’t pay me to study Irish again.”
There were times, mid-course, when I too wondered why I was subjecting myself to it voluntarily. After a brief conversation with the triage nurse, I had been diagnosed as a “level four” case: the exact middle of the range of classes offered for adults by Oideas Gael. But as the week developed, I often thought I should have swallowed my pride, pretended that 12 years of school never happened, and started anew with the foreigners, nordies, and former conscientious objectors in Level 1.
Among the non-language courses also offered by Oideas Gael is an annual “archaeology week”, inspired by Glencolmcille’s great wealth of antiquities. I missed that, but my Irish course was something similar. By putting me in level four, the school clearly thought that, based on what was known of its past, a week-long excavation of my brain would surely turn up something valuable.
I was optimistic too at first. Secretly I hoped we might stumble upon an ancient treasure trove of buried Irish, like one of those pre-Christian sites that halt work on motorways. I imagined our course being interrupted while experts were called in to admire the miraculous fluency I had recovered after three days, including words of rare south Ulster Irish previously feared lost to the language.
Sadly, this didn’t happen. The dig revealed the usual shards of useless pottery (“ba mhaith liom cupan tae”, etc), some evidence of an extinct way of life (“bosca teleafon”, “m’asal beag dubh”), and the remains of what may once have been complex grammatical structures. But we never found anything important enough to stop the bulldozers.
Our teacher Bláithín was endlessly patient, endlessly creative in devising games and dramas to coax whatever vocabulary we had out of us and make us forget our embarrassment at the state of it. She urged us to abandon our “bagáiste”. We had a lot of bagáiste relating to Irish, she said, and we needed to leave this outside the door and treat the language like any other.
But this was easier said than done. On the occasions I was forced to tell the class about myself, as Gaeilge, it was painfully obvious that I sounded like the village idiot; and the shame was worse for believing there was no excuse.
“Me born and grow up in Monaghan, but me live in Dublin this day,” I would hear myself saying, as Bláithín nodded and told me I was great. “My have three child. Me like football. Football plenty good.” And those were my better moments. There were others when I couldn’t think of anything at all to say; when I desperately waved the metal detector around the area where I thought the Irish was hidden and it just refused to beep. At such moments, it was like primary school all over again: all I was missing was short trousers and a snotty nose. There’s some baggage you couldn’t lose even in Heathrow Terminal Five.
Despite all of this, I survived the week. And apart from the occasional flashbacks, I seem not to have suffered major psychological damage. So, having begun the process of re-learning Irish, I’m determined to continue. At least I have a better idea now what to say to someone who asks me why. But I also know how steep the learning curve will be.
Did I mention genders? One of the many things I had forgotten was that every Irish noun has a gender, with grammatical consequences. Naturally, logic is no help in remembering which is which. Contrary to what you might think, for example, “steak” is feminine; whereas “salad” is not. Most pastimes are feminine too, including boxing, wrestling, football, and parachute jumping. But the brief list of masculine pursuits includes yoga.
And there’s worse. The aforementioned “bagáiste” is masculine, which is just about understandable. So are both “fish” and “chips”, and I can relate to that too. But bizarrely, “cailín” is also masculine: which makes no sense at all, although it does perhaps throw some light on why that young woman in Killybegs had issues with the language.