Chrissie Stokes grew up in Dorset and moved from London to Dún Laoghaire with her Irish husband in 1995, while pregnant with their second child.
Arriving in Dublin, she was confused.
“I was going, what is this bal-ya a-tha clia-th? I actually had no idea there was another language, Irish, I was completely ignorant. Anyways, I lived in done lee-og-hair, I was like, where do I live?” she says.
A mother to two young children, she knew she had to get a job. She began cleaning houses regularly and doing belly dancing to make ends meet.
“Cleaning was not well paid, belly dancing was quite well paid, but not that frequent, not a nine to five job,” Stokes says. So, she decided she would pursue teaching.
“Then I realised, of course, you have to do Irish to do teaching in Ireland. My kids were still small at that stage so I started going to Irish classes with a view to doing the Leaving Cert which would enable me to do a postgraduate teaching course.
“So I went to every class, I went to Gael Linn, Conradh na Gaeilge, whatever local classes I could find, I was going up to [do courses in] Oideas Gael in Glencolmcille in Donegal,” she explains.
Co-founder of Oideas Gael and former chairperson of Údáras na Gaeltachta Liam Ó Cuinneagáin helped encourage Stokes not to give up the language during her time there, as she was worried after her first class that she had “spent all our money coming on the course,” and had “no idea what was happening”.
“[Ó Cuinneagáin] came out and I was really aware you’re not supposed to speak in English, I was being paranoid, I was like I just don’t understand what’s going on, and he was like ‘don’t worry, don’t worry’, and sure enough I would go up to Glen whenever I could and it’s great craic,” she laughs now, recalling her first class with the Donegal blas.
“It’s such a beautiful space and you meet loads of really cool people and they’re all learning Irish, and the teachers are all really, really cool.”
Stokes also listened to tapes of Now You’re Talking, which also had Donegal Irish, while “hoovering people’s houses and cleaning their toilets,” muttering Irish to herself.
“I ended up getting quite a Donegal accent. I’d be going to places like Conradh na Gaeilge and we’d be speaking Irish during the classes and they’d say, ‘oh cérb as thú?’ And I’d say ‘is as Sasana mé’, and they’d be like ‘what?!’ because I’m so ‘caidé mar atá tú?’ and ‘atá [at-ah] mé, tá mé go maith’.
“I’d be saying go mai-h instead of go mah, so everybody thought I was from Donegal which was quite amusing,” Stokes says.
She first sat the Ordinary Level paper, before moving on to Honours Irish, getting a B1 (H2 equivalent), before going on to get her postgraduate in teaching and still gives praise to the teachers who helped her along the way.
“Gaeilgeoirs are so nice, they will give you their time,” Stokes says, “I couldn’t get over how kind people were helping me out because I guess they really love the language and when they see somebody really trying to learn it, they are really generous with their time.
“I think a lot of people find Irish really difficult to learn or didn’t have a good experience in school, like when I talk to parents about their kids I’m teaching they have quite a negative view towards the learning of the language,” Stokes says, adding that she likes teaching the language to children now because she remembers “what a headwreck it can be”.
“I remember words with urús on them going what? How can you have an n before a d? Irish is crazy, it’s mental.”
Stokes now teaches in Monkstown Educate Together National School in Dún Laoghaire.
“I try and make games and have a bit of craic, some fun with it rather than just be leathan le leathan, caol le caol, blah blah blah, which of course I do teach, but we try and make it a bit more fun,” she says.
One thing Stokes uses to her advantage in the classroom though, is the fact that she is from England.
“I love doing the thing where the kids are like, ‘why do we have to learn Irish?’ and I go, ‘well hang on a second, where are you from?’ ‘Ireland’ ‘okay, what language do you speak?’ ‘English…’ ‘Well I’m English and I’m speaking your language, why are you speaking my language?’ and they’re like, ‘oh...’
“And I go ‘yeah, because the English forced you pretty much to lose it, don’t you think it’s time you take it back?’, and that works for some kids, they’re like ‘you’re right’, and I go ‘yeah, the British came, they suppressed the language, they took over the country, what do you think? Should we not be speaking Irish? Why are we speaking my language, why don’t you speak your own?”
The teacher has, however, had to soften her Ulster dialect while teaching in Leinster, but is “still pretty much Donegal-ish.
“I think the Donegal blas is the most musical, it’s lovely, I really like it compared to some of the others,” she laughs.
The children do enjoy correcting their teacher when she goes off kilter though, telling her it’s ‘go maith (mah)’ instead of ‘go maith (mai-h)’, and reminding her to say the m in dom, as in some areas of Donegal ‘dom’ is pronounced ‘do’.
The Irish language is still alive and well, Stokes adds, saying that she hopes to return to the Gaeltacht to brush up on her Irish again when she retires.
“Every course I ever went to, there were always people trying to learn more Irish and there’s people all over the world, like look at Oideas Gael, they have people from America coming over, from Canada, from all over, and they do lots of online courses as well,” Ms Stokes says.
“I mean, [the Irish language] is out there and it’s only out there because there’s an interest.”
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