Cupla focal for men of the Gaeltacht

WHILE we wait to see what sharing this island with an unhappy province of the United Kingdom does to our well being next, let…

WHILE we wait to see what sharing this island with an unhappy province of the United Kingdom does to our well being next, let me turn to a native and topical issue.

And that is the way the men who run the colaiste samhraidh - in a certain Gaeltacht area know - expect the women, who are the bean a tis there, to jump to their whip. The men who control the local scene won't assign children to a perfectly decent woman in the area who happens' to be a single mother. And they've made it clear [they expect the women who take in children to be in the house more or less all the time.

And the parents who pack off their young ones to the Gaeltacht, often with temporary heartbreak on both sides, are probably delighted to heard about these sneaky, unwritten, rules. They may be single mothers themselves. They may be fathers who never get home from the office in time to see the kids. The cuisine of the home may consist of slinging a supermarket lasagne into a microwave.

The children may be well used to and quite unfazed by minding themselves while the adults go out to choir practice or ten pin bowling or multiple adultery. But when it comes to the Gaeltacht, the reality of Irish lifestyles is subsumed to the vision which is all that remains of the puritanism of the State's founders. In the minds of the urban middle class it is an ideal place.

READ MORE

The bean a tis bear the brunt of this idealism. An ideal sean fhear at least gets out of the house to make haycocks by hand, and stand out at the gate looking amiably at the scolairi as they pass through the rustic landscape in their reversed baseball caps, playing forbidden Pulp CDs on their portable players. But ideal sean mna have to stay in the home. There, they are to be kindly and apple cheeked and tethered to the Rayburn. They must be content for amusement after a day of persuading sour youngsters from Dublin that cabbage is not an active poison, to pour out a cup of tea and take up a copy of Comhar or Feasta for a few minutes read, before kneeling to the Rosary. Anything else would disappoint the parents who send their kids to the Gaeltacht.

They send them for the following reasons. 1. Because they would like their children to speak Irish the same as they would like a united Ireland, that is, if it just fell down the chimney and didn't inconvenience anybody and didn't cost a penny on their taxes and didn't come against anybody in later life; 2. Because they went to a Gaeltacht themselves and had a great time messing; 3. Because everyone sends their kids to the Gaeltacht and their own kids have threatened to commit suicide if they can't go with their pals; 4. Because the only benign native myth is the one about western self sufficiency and sugan chairs and paraffin lamps and soda bread hot from the three legged pot, and every nation needs a myth.

Because the Gaeltacht amazingly enough given the prelapasarian myth in 4 is the site of the rite of passage from childhood to adolescence of many young Irish people.

I do not know what boys and girls do to each other on their way home to the teachs of the exemplary bean a tis. But it leads to young girls needing the money to go into town to meet youths at MacDonalds for a "Gaeltacht reunion" approximately one week after getting back from the Gaeltacht, on pain of - see 3 above - committing suicide if they're not let.

In this situation, obscured by wishful thinking and powered by hormonal urgency, the bean a tis, are the only ones not allowed to have fun. They don't get what big money there is and they don't get to do shudderingly daring things in graveyards and behind sand dunes with 14 year olds of the opposite sex. Yet these are their summers, too. They take payment in exchange for looking after vulnerable young people, and they must of course be there to mind them properly.

That's only fair. But I don't see why the bean a tis can't have a night or two of the week off, if she, makes suitable arrangements for the care of the household while she's out. I don't see why she can't be a single mother, or just single, or gay, or an atheist or anything else she likes, as long as she knows how to look after young people through the medium of Irish. Why should she be a theme park mammy? That way hypocrisy lies (not that hypocrisy isn't native).

WHAT ALL this is involved with myth is evidenced by the different ethos obtaining when it comes to taking foreign students into Dublin homes. There are, of course, guidelines about this, but in practice it is precisely, single mothers who most enthusiastically take in students, precisely because the one piece of capital they have is the house and the students are the only way they can turn the house into money. So, if you're speaking English while you feed a young person and you're single, that's okay. But if you're speaking Irish that isn't okay. Somewhere, you know, there's a Mr and Mrs Garcia as anxious that their little Juans and Marias should be loved by an Irish mammy in a pinny as any Dublin parents are, when they send their young ones off to "learn" Irish. But there's one law for foreigners, and another for our little Aoifes and Declans.

I love the Gaeltacht phenomenon. If it didn't exist, you couldn't possibly invent it. Who would have thought that a Gaelic League dream would have been so resilient - would have answered so many needs? I like the old fashioned aspect of the whole thing. I went, a few years ago, with a group of little girls, to a colaiste samhraidh. I went on the train. I went to the house. I went to the school. I saw their hysterical tears and imploring phone calls to their dad dies back home change to pyjama clad bonding on the bunk beds. I saw how modern pedagogy has made no inroads on the teaching of Irish. We sang "oro se do bheatha abhaile" over and over.

At night, muscular teaching assistants hurled young boys across the floor at girls, to get them to pair up for the ceili dancing. It was a truly innocent week. Innocence is what we want to surround the first experience of a child's leaving home. But that shouldn't be used to allow the men who control the business side of the dream to push the local women around. If this goes on, the women will have to organise themselves. Believe me, if the single mothers among them offer pizza instead of potatoes, and free hair mousse, the kids will beat a path to the door gabh mo leith sceal, to the doras - and they'll get all the repeat business.