Loose Leaves SadhIt's quite a testament to the late Princess Grace of Monaco that, while it's 22 years since her death after a car crash, the legacy of her love of Irish culture is the cutting-edge debate on aspects of it which still takes place regularly in the Mediterranean principality.
One such symposium took place there last weekend when 12 academics met to thrash out the subject of critical discourse in 20th-century Ireland at the Princess Grace Irish Library on Rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine.
The library was founded within two years of Grace's death by her widower, Prince Rainier, who was aware of her 600 books of Irish interest and set up a library to house them. Now it has 9,000 books and regularly hosts speakers from Ireland, as well as symposia such as last weekend's which was chaired by Dr Bruce Stewart of the University of Ulster at Coleraine, the library's literary adviser.
One speaker, Michael Cronin, director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University (below, right), addressed the consequences for Irish culture of the fact that the relative health of the Irish economy had brought the citizens of Babel to the doorstep. The scale of the change in the linguistic make-up of Irish society could be gauged from a suggestion by the Eastern Regional Health Authority that it was dealing with more than 130 languages and the commitment by the Courts Services to provide translation and interpreting services in 210 languages. New immigrant languages were moving Ireland into a new language future but the past in Ireland was also rich in multilingualism; pre-Celtic languages, dialects of Celtic invaders, integration of Latin after the conversion of the Irish to Christianity, the assimilation of the Vikings' Scandinavian dialects, to name just some. One effect of acknowledging this is that language change could be presented less as a threat to the founding languages of the nation and more as part of an Irish multilingual tradition which had been largely overshadowed by the rivalry between Irish and English.
"Something vital is being transacted in Ireland at present and language is at the heart of the transaction." Many of the new immigrants came with a number of languages to which they wanted to add Irish. In an Irish language course run by Conradh na Gaeilge for refugees and asylum seekers in Galway city in 2003, among the mother tongues of those attending were Kikuyu, Swahili, Igbo and Lingala. In this context it was possible to see language not as a barrier but as a cultural and aesthetic resource.
Dr Geraldine Moane, of the Psychology Department of University College Dublin, argued that Irish society had failed to acknowledge or transform the legacies of colonialism, some of which were negative, psychological ones. Critical literature on the Celtic Tiger supported the view that far from alleviating the inequalities of Irish society, the transformed Irish State continued to produce patterns of domination. She spoke of alcohol abuse, mental illness, racism, violence and recklessness and argued that they were not merely the inevitable result of modernisation; unchallenged legacies of colonialism were rendering us more vulnerable to the negative impacts of globalisation. Dr Moane also spoke about what she called a huge ambivalence over the foundation of the State - 1916, 1921, the Civil War - and asked why there was as yet no Independence Day here as in other post-colonial countries.
Dr Máirín Nic Eoin of the Irish Department in St Patrick's College Drumcondra, Dublin, told the symposium that literary criticism was still the Cinderella of literary scholarship in Irish university departments, adding that one major topic for critical debate in Irish pivoted on the standard of language acceptable in a modern literature in Irish. More and more Gaeltacht writers had come to ignore the strictures of former generations of revivalists and to attempt more realistic depictions of language as spoken in Gaeltacht regions. Critical response to these developments had been wary mainly because of the critics' vested interests (as teachers, college lecturers, publishers) in the survival of the purer forms and of a sustainable and distinguishable Irish-speaking language group.
Also participating were academics Fintan Cullen, Terry Eagleton, Anne Fogarty, Colin Graham, John Hill, Eve Patten, Shaun Richards, Gerry Smyth and Clair Wills. Listening to their deliberations, one wished that scholars such as these could be winkled out of academia more often. In the dumbed-down world we live in, the more thought and ideas that hit the mainstream the better.
For more details see www.monaco.mc/pglib and www.pgil-eirdata.org