"Listen, carefully."
"No. That's not right."
"Yes it is. He's saying `out'."
"I'm not sure."
"Listen. It's definitely `out'."
My son Ultan, 15 months old, is standing in his cot, arms raised towards me and his mother. He makes another sound. It does sound like "out". My wife is delighted. Our son can speak. Unfortunately, it sounds as if he's speaking English. He looks at us once more, curls his hand and says: "Bye, bye". "No, no. Say: `Slan, an.' "slan'."
I'm the mad professor at number 16, the fellow who is doing his best to raise his child through Irish. My son is more lab rat than rug rat to all intents and purposes. I've been known to push his buggy through rural Ulster singing Is mise an tiomanai traenach to him in an effort to immerse him in an Irish-speaking environment. He doesn't seem too embarrassed - so far. Certainly, there are some difficulties that the lonesome Irish-speaker has to face in a rural community. Forget that none of my immediate family speaks Irish, that there is no Irish-speaking primary school within 30 miles, and that you can count the number of Irish speakers in this area on the thumb of one hand. Forget all those minor details and think positively. Positive thinking has been my motto over the past 15 months.
Gripped by Gloom
But it's beginning to look as if the good intentions are not paying off. Like any good Irish speaker, I am prone to bouts of depression, self-doubt, romantic bouts of fantasy. At present I'm gripped by gloom. I find myself wondering whether it's time to throw in the tuaille on this little experiment.
Why bother? Will Irish feed my child? Will it clothe him? Will he end up being even crazier than his da, carting around a knowledge of books and poetry and an understanding of cultural artefacts that fewer and fewer seem to be interested in?
Give the wee fella a computer and he'll be fine, I'm told. Computers are what it's all about now, I'm told. You'll end up damaging him, I'm told. Raising a child through Irish is often seen as an act of folly in modern Ireland - be you native speaker or no.
To me, it's always been an act of faith, like bedtime prayers. Nevertheless, there is a sort of paralysis involved when you have learnt a language from grammar books and trips to the Gaeltacht. I'm still not 100 per cent sure how he will "pick up" what I'm saying to him - though friends in even remoter places of the North (Dungannon, to be precise) tell me he will. I speak Irish and everyone else speaks English and I'll win! Will he simply think that Daddy speaks with a different accent to all the rest of the family, friends, countryside, Planet Earth?
Comfort in Books
Like many people who have studied languages, I find comfort in books. I learnt Irish through its grammar - conjugations of verbs, declensions of nouns, gender, genitive case, vocative case, dative case, accusative case, etc. - before I began to speak it.
I didn't go the Gaeltacht until I was 16, a full five years after the Brothers began to teach us Irish. (And, by the way, the Brothers didn't beat Irish into me. But I still haven't understood why they forced geometry on us. What use is it? Will it feed you? Will it clothe you?) To say that the Gaeltacht was an eye-opener would be an understatement. It was a bit like learning to swim by reading. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of actual water. The Gaeltacht bore no resemblance to west Belfast in the early 1980s and the reasons that people spoke Irish, even then, bore no resemblance to the slogans that many (but by no means all) Irish speakers in the city were spouting at the time.
To listen finally to people speaking Irish in a shop and not in the classroom was a road-to-Damascus experience (though in my case it was actually Min an Chladaigh). To my amazement, I found out that I could translate what I had learnt in the classroom ("Ta an spunog sa doirteal") into oral form.
Honest Attempt
"A bhean an ti, an bhfuil spunog agat?" By no means a forceful discourse on the ills of the Ireland of the time, but an honest attempt to begin a dialogue. University and journalism were, for me, further attempts at carrying on that dialogue. Raising a child through Irish ensures that this dialogue remains unpunctured for a future generation.
My father's father was originally from the Donegal Gaeltacht. He left the area at the beginning of the century and went to Belfast to work. None of the eight children he and my grandmother reared in New Barnsley in west Belfast ever spoke Irish. Indeed my father, son of a native speaker, actually tried learning the language in Belfast's Ardscoil during his own youth.
There was a complete breakdown between my grandfather's linguistic heritage and his children's. Of the extended family of grandchildren, cousins, aunts, uncles, I am the only one who speaks Irish. My grandfather would never have dreamt of raising his children through Irish. It is a tradition which has taken root in the North only since the 1960s; a tradition which demands much effort of the parents but one which gives an added value to raising a child - or so I'm told by romantic souls.
- Ultan. Abair "amach".
- Out.
- Slan.
- Bye-bye.