We say we want to protect our native language, yet we learn little in school and few of us speak it at home. Do we truly cherish Irish - or are we subconsciously trying to kill it?
Last year I made a television series called No Béarla, in which I travelled around Ireland trying to speak only Irish. I didn't get on very well, especially in Dublin, where I was often abused and ignored. Outside the capital, people were more friendly, but they rarely understood what I was trying to say. What struck me most were the expressions I saw in people's eyes: shame, fear, anger, jealousy and yearning. I wanted to know what lay behind this complex cocktail of emotion, and so this year I set out again, hoping to explore the issue more deeply, to find out how Irish people really feel about their language and what they want to do about it.
I decided to start with the mystery of how we all can learn Irish for 10 years in school and still come away not speaking it. I wondered was there a psychological block rooted in the shame of our former poverty that prevented us. To test this, I taught an Irish lesson to a group of Polish people and an Irish group and then examined them on it. The results were startling: the Irish, de- spite their 1,500 school Irish lessons, fared only 10 per cent better. Either the Poles were extremely clever, or the language isn't that difficult.
To test this further, I brought some Irish people to a hypnotist to see if we could bypass their shame and hang-ups to reach the well of language that must lie dormant inside them. And the moment they were relaxed the language did begin to surface.
Of course, these experiments weren't very scientific - I was making a television series, not a clinical study - but they did hint at why people reacted so strongly, positively and negatively, to my trip around Ireland last year speaking only the "First Official Language". People wrote to me from all around the world thanking me for highlighting the problems the language was facing, but in Dublin I was accosted and accused of setting the language back a generation by my negative reporting.
They denied there was any problem and so, just to clarify the issue for them, I went to an Irish university and gave the students a test to see if they could differentiate Irish from Klingon (the language created for Star Trek). They failed to tell the difference in 30 per cent of cases.
Everyone I met blamed the problems on someone else, principally on the schools, but when I went to speak to the woman who teaches the teachers she cited studies that prove that education alone cannot revive a language. Unless Irish people decide to speak Irish outside school, its future is grim.
The only person who was prepared to admit that the fault may lie with all of us was the social commentator, John Waters, who suggests that we may all be subconsciously conspiring to kill the language - we claim we want our children to learn it at school, but we make no effort to foster it at home. In this way we can be sure of its death, yet our hands will be seen to be clean.
The issue is so thorny that after a few weeks my head was spinning with all the double-speak and deception people were feeding me. The Government claims it supports Irish and fought to have it recognised as an official language of Europe (for the four Irish MEPs who can actually speak it), yet the standard of teaching aids it provides is so poor that the EU had to order the Government to publish a proper grammar book, one that was not out of date or out of print.
Donna Wong, a Californian woman of Chinese extraction, had to produce her own Learner's Guide to Irish (Cois Life, 2004) because she could find nothing suitable available in Ireland. What does it say about us when foreigners have to write our textbooks for us?
The Irish Film Board claims that it actively supports the language, yet, while the Welsh Film Board has supported 87 films in Welsh, our film board has funded only one Irish-language film. They claim it's not practical to use Irish when competing against major Hollywood films, yet Ned Dowd, a Hollywood producer, points to the success of his film, Apocalypto, with Mel Gibson, which was in Mayan., and also that Gibson's previous film, The Passion of the Christ, was in Aramaic and earned hundreds of millions of dollars.
SOME PEOPLE SAY the dialects are at fault - there are at least four main ones and two more have developed recently in Dublin and Belfast. It is said that they fragment the language and provoke irritation among people of other dialects - I've been told on occasion in Donegal to stop speaking my cac-Gaeilge caighdeánach (shit, official Irish) when I try to converse with them in my Kerry dialect.
To test the effects of dialects on people, I strapped headphones onto some native Donegal speakers, subjecting them to a sustained assault of intense Munster Irish for prolonged periods and, to my surprise, found that it sent their IQ levels soaring.
So, what does that say? That we should have more dialects? Others blame the Gaeltachtaí for not being open to learners. Visitors say they get either dismissed or sniggered at when they try to speak a few words to the locals. To put these claims to the test we wired some native Gaeltacht people to a polygraph machine and asked them how they treated Irish learners, and it seemed that either they were always unfailingly polite or polygraph machines cannot in fact discern the truth. I suspect the latter might be the case, although Des Bishop's series shows that Connemara folk are welcoming, at least when a camera crew is around.
Everyone I met had a different recommendation as to what to do about the language, but none were really practical. A former language activist, who stormed news studios and scaled broadcasting aerials to gain recognition for Irish in the 1970s, said my single biggest duty was to raise children with Irish, and if I didn't have any, to go out and spawn some and start raising them as Gaeilgeoirí.
Others said we had to ban the language, as Franco did with Catalan, with the result that it is now a thriving language spoken fluently by 100 per cent of its political representatives (as opposed to the 13 per cent of Irish politicians who speak Irish). I talked to a former H-Block prisoner in Belfast who had learnt Irish during the 1970s, long before it was finally recognised as an official language in the North (as part of the 1998 Belfast Agreement). He told me how the inmates shrunk the Christian Brothers grammar book so that it could be sneaked into prison hidden up their bottoms. Without any lessons, or even access to pen and paper, the inmates managed to learn fluent Irish within a year. New vocabulary was passed between them by gouging words into the cell walls using the crucifix on their rosary beads, so that when they were moved between cells a fresh store of words awaited them.
Irish is now thriving in parts of nationalist Belfast. It is considered a mark of identity, spawning its own newspapers, radio stations and schools.
THE MAN WHO almost single-handedly revived Manx (the native language of the Isle of Man), Brian Stowell, believes that the biggest problem with Irish now is that it is compulsory in schools.
He managed to change what the Collins Dictionary defines as "an almost extinct Celtic language" to a thriving one, by giving people in the Isle of Man the choice of whether or not they wanted to learn it. He said one of the greatest assets in helping the language was the fact that the last native speaker had died, and with him went the attitude that it was somehow shameful or backward. Using my Munster Irish, I was able to speak to young children on the Isle of Man, who had no difficulty understanding my cac-Ghaeilge, despite the fact that I was speaking not just a different dialect but a different language. The language, for them, wasn't a badge of shame. They were eager and proud, and were keen to communicate with their Celtic cousins. That's all it requires, for us to be eager and proud.
Manchán Magan is a writer and documentary-maker. No Béarla 2 begins on TG4 on Mar 28. www.manchan.com
