From gaeltacht to DART-tacht

Something just has to be done to stop the spread of the DART accent; and personally, I think the time has come to use the ultimate weapon. Yes, I know it's extreme, but I believe we have to make it compulsory in schools.

It used to be a reasonable hope that this accent was a passing fad which would eventually die of shame, in the same way as legwarmers and men wearing pony-tails. Instead it has gone from strength to strength.

New speakers are hitting the airwaves daily, some of them getting their own TV shows. Even more worrying is the thought that the first generation of DART-speakers are now becoming parents, and children in the cradle are learning to say words like "ryndabite". It's horrible to contemplate. Horrible.

But there is hope. And in this case it springs from the State's long experience in promoting the Irish language; an effort which, as we know, nearly succeeded in eradicating it. At least we can salvage something from that whole sorry business by using the same techniques now on DART-speak.

Ideally, we should get the Christian Brothers involved, if only on a consultancy basis. But most of the necessary steps are obvious: 10 per cent bonuses for students doing their oral exams through the accent, and so on.

We need to go further than schools, of course. DART-intensive areas of Dublin should be isolated for special treatment, and children from the west encouraged to spend their summers there, living in the houses of native speakers (and sent home, needless to say, the moment they're caught speaking other dialects).

The scheme could be extended to the civil service, with an oral exam for all entrants (a harder one for anyone looking for a job in the Department of Arts, Heritage, DART-speaking areas and the Islands, obviously). But the main thing is that the State encourages people to speak it, in every way possible.

Of course, before we embark on this policy, we need to be clear what the DART accent is. The last time I wrote about it, I was invited onto a radio panel discussion on the subject, where everybody was talking about something different. One guy was going on about anglofied accents in RTE, which might be a problem, but it wasn't mine; and there was a talented mimic on the panel who wasn't sure what the DART accent was, but could do a very good Mary Robinson instead.

So let me say again that the key element of DART-speak - the bit that attacks the nervous system of listeners in the same way as the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard, or this year's Irish Eurovision entry - is the sound that occurs twice in the word "southbound" and four times in the phrase "How now brown cow?".

When I wrote about it previously, I suggested this was a vowel sound; but thanks to a letter from fellow sufferers Patsy and Kevin Flanagan from Ballyhaunis, I now know it is in fact a "diphthong". And I mention this highly technical term here only because I think it could also be useful in the marketing campaign to "promote" the accent, which is the second part of my plan.

For example, we could have advertising slogans like "Diphthong's for you"; which I promise is the only one of the many terrible puns available that I'm going to share with you here. (Ok, I lied. How about: "Diphthong's bigger than the both of us?")

With this kind of promotion, on top of the education-based approach already outlined, I think we can kill the accent within a generation. At least we have to try.

One of the great successes of the Belfast Agreement was the clause requiring the people of the Republic to continue using the English five pence piece in their daily transactions, despite the fact that not only is it not legal tender here, but it isn't even the same size or design as the corresponding Irish coin.

No, of course this wasn't in the Belfast Agreement. But if it had been (the section on confidence-building measures would be the obvious place for it) the English five pence piece could not have expected better treatment than it already gets in this country, in defiance of all logic. Of course, English one and two pence pieces also circulate here, largely unnoticed. But at least these are the same size and shape as their Irish counterparts. Whereas the main similarity between the two five-pences is that both have a special design feature that allows them to roll out of your hand and into the nearest drain with monotonous regularity.

Indeed, with the in-depth research typical of this column, I've established that the Irish five pence piece is much more physically similar to, say, the five peseta coin (Don't even think about claiming for a trip to Spain - Ed) than the English five pence piece, though nobody would deliberately try to use the Spanish currency here.

So this week I rang the Central Bank to see if it had any policy on the rogue five-pences - like forced repatriation.

I'm sorry to say, however, that the bank has no policy at all on the impostor coins, and could not even offer an estimate on how many were circulating here (8,546,310 I told them, but I was only messing).

This is not good enough. I know five pence doesn't buy much these days, but if we go to the trouble of designing our own currency, it should at least have exclusive rights here. It's an issue of national pride, after all.

If I was starting a national campaign on the issue - and I would if I wasn't already so busy trying to save Guinness's marketing department from itself - the slogan would be: "The single currency? Shame we've never tried it."