There is a valiant corner of Dublin which holds out against the tempest of multinational commerce, a fortress of traditional Irishness whose ramparts are manned by that doughty son of Donegal, Enda Cunningham: Cathach Books of Duke Street. It is one the greatest jewels of the capital. How he survives, beset as he is by the massed armies of international capitalism, is beyond me, writes Kevin Myers
No doubt he sleeps in his cellar catching mice and swatting flies as sources of nutrition: they do say that grilled bluebottle has its points, though in my personal experience the crunchy bit of the bluebottle abdomen tends to get caught in the teeth.
Enda is also the heroic publisher of Four Masters Press, which has one of the most delightful catalogues in Ireland. It has recently produced the first ever Irish-Icelandic-English book, Einar Ólafur Sveinsson's enchanting Impressions of Ireland, written in 1947, and published here for the first time. Many things about that (now lost) Ireland bewitched this visitor (as equally, his account will enchant the modern reader) but poor Einar ran into a brick wall with the Irish language.
"Irskan er svo óliköðrum málum, að ó gerningur er að skilja hana nema hún se lærð gagnert," he wrote rather warmly, and I couldn't agree with him more. "það er borið fram með. . ."
What? There are some non-Icelandic speakers in our midst? Brutes! I will translate. "Irish is different from any language and it is not possible to understand unless one has learnt it thoroughly." He then listed his complaints about the language. One was that it possessed an impossibly guttural "ach", and it had diphthongs and triphthongs in positively Faeroese proportions. The vowels were never to be relied on, as in good old Icelandic. Worst of all, even consonants changed. Almost weeping, he added that prepositions could be declined, like personal pronouns, which in turn could occasionally be absorbed into the verb.
My feelings exactly. In my Irish language classes I left my lungs, my tonsils and several inches of my trachea on the classroom floor, thanks to those gutturals. And I can forgive a language many things, but I cannot forgive it for making the plural of "bean" "mná". As for prepositions with case endings, I have never heard of anything so wicked in my life, exceeding even the worst excesses of the Conquistadors.
All in all, I found Irish classes not dissimilar to climbing Mont Blanc in ice-skates (and I never even approached declining prepositions: if I had, I should have left their little prepositional cadavers in a broken heap, their evil case-endings scattered around the classroom floor). A platypus would have been a better student of Irish than I was.
My teacher would intone some sentence in Irish at me, knee-deep in triphthongs and tonsil-amputating gutturals, and then ask me to repeat it. I would draw a deep breath, and out would tumble the words "Ad deum quae laetificat, juventutum meum." That's it. My brain can't house Irish. Feed in Irish and out comes Latin. Or French. Or even Icelandic. But not Irish.
So I got through Irish-language teachers the way Joan Collins used to get through men, sometimes two at a time. One could always tell when they realised they were losing the battle. The tic in the right eye. The inconsequential giggle. The tendency to open the window and climb out, three storeys up.
Our Icelandic guest came to Donegal all those years ago, seeking the place of origin of the Irish monks who moved to Iceland 1500 years ago. He wondered, whence? But the real question is, why? For nothing is as incomprehensible as the decision of those Irish monks to travel to Iceland in the 5th century. Some might argue it was because the monks wanted to watch naked blonde women frisking in the geysers, as is their wont over there. But that's today, not back then, for Icelanders didn't exist in those days. The Vikings hadn't yet invented them. No nude women. No Eddas. No sagas. No names ending in -son or -dottir.
It's not as if the Irish monks went to sea in a proper sailing vessel such as the Phoenicians used. Irish boats in the dark ages were basically oversized shoes: made of leather, with no sail, no rudder, no keel, but maybe just a heel, with perhaps a buckle. So why did the monks leave the safety of Donegal for the horrors of the briny main in barely more than a floating sandal?
I have a theory here. It is not widely known, but the Myers ancestral roots are in Donegal. Like any columnist, I am a plagiarist. My father was a practitioner of the "general" variety. His father was a peeler. His father was a plumber. Clearly, we are a family who follow the p-professions. But true Gaels could not pronounce the letter "p"; we, on the other hand, allow the letter to dominate our entire lives.
So, is that it? Is the inability of p-professionals to speak Irish genetically encoded in our DNA? And were all those monks who risked everything to get out of Donegal merely escaping from the untamed proto-Myers in Irish language classes? They simply couldn't bear another day of this slack-jawed cretin at the back, his forehead the same size as his little toe, never being able to remember the simplest thing, such as the Irish third person singular, future conditional, pluperfect preterite, in the subjunctive mood, of the female form for "at".
Thus the mad flight of those poor Donegal monks, wading into the sea, shrieking hysterically, heading for safety in Iceland.