WHAT AN interesting St Patrick's Day this is, with the Hill of Tara under siege by Government forces and the Irish language's only hope of survival residing with Des Bishop. It is probably just as well that our parliamentary representatives are on the guts of a month's holidays, worn out from counting their money, writes Anne-Marie Hourihane.
Not much other news, really, except for the implosion of our rugby team and the understandable excitement caused by the fact that 100 new jobs have been created at the Homecare store in Cavan. Thank goodness the Fianna Fáil press office had the good sense to issue a press release on the subject of the latter event.
So, all in all, we have to say that this Irish language revival business is not really such a big surprise. Things are kind of slow. There are those of us who suspect that the Irish language often raises its tired old head at such moments of cultural sluggishness. As Des Bishop has it, we're turning to the first national language now that every Irish town has a Starbucks. In other words, when we haven't got any other ideas.
Perhaps it was the same for Pádraig Pearse, for whom Irish really was a first love. When he went to lecture the men of Connemara about how important it was for them to stay where they were and speak the Irish language, they replied that the language was no good to them "beyond the burned house".
The burned house was a derelict building on the outskirts of their town. It marked the beginning of the outside world, where they had to go to find work to support their families. Pearse's reply to this is, as far as I know, unrecorded.
Poor Pearse, his own Irish was criticised by some fellow language activists as inferior, and this hurt him deeply. Irish language experts always muttered to each other about someone having "lovely Irish", and it seemed that you could not acquire this lovely Irish easily, no matter how hard you tried. Like most elites, this is one into which you supposedly had to be born. And the laugh of it all was that the people who were really born into it - such as the poor of Connemara and of the Blaskets - were left in grinding poverty, their communities destroyed. And they had to go off to speak their lovely Irish in America.
You have to admire the sectarianism of Irish. In such a tiny country, there do seem to be an awful lot of different ways to speak it; the language has been used by a series of secret societies to keep out the stranger.
Before we launch into a 21st-century version of Buntus Cainte we should take time out to lie down for a couple of hours with a copy of Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People, a portrait of a home where Irish reigned supreme and terrifying.
One of the most bitter arguments I ever witnessed was at a wedding reception in west Belfast, at the height of the hunger strikes. It was about the ability to speak Irish. A married couple were insulted because they had been slighted for not being able to speak Irish.
The husband pointed out that they had never had the opportunity to learn it, because neither of them had been in jail. He further pointed out that both he and his wife had collected money faithfully for the local Irish language classes. This man was almost in tears. Of course we were all, as that old Gaelic scholar, Paul Whitehouse, would put it, frightfully drunk. Nevertheless, that was the moment when I realised that the Irish language was a competitive sport. This has been off-putting for someone who didn't learn what "le cunadh De" meant until she was 44.
If only Irish came by itself, instead of trailing the puritanism, the cliquishness and the superiority that have been its death knell for the past century. In modern times the Irish language has always been a protest. It became the hijab of our fragile Irishness - a little fragment of cloth which was a symbol of rejection of the modern world, and hatred of it. It was imposed by men and women who had won some sort of ideological war, but who were a tad short on ideology. Let's not take it up again now just because we've been forced to take a break from house buying.
To hear teenagers quietly speaking Irish. To read Maurice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years A-Growing. To find out that the endearment "macushla" comes from the Irish word for pulse. These are the things that would encourage a person to look more closely at the Irish language.
It is interesting to hear that there is an Irish-language lunch each Thursday in the Law Library, where they munch a few "ceapairí" (sandwiches) through the medium, but it doesn't exactly send you running for the dictionary, does it? I mean, if barristers are that patriotic why don't they just drop their fees? But then, as the old saying goes, all beginnings are weak."