Slán to the zealots and awful teachers – it’s now up to us to mind our beautiful language
I WORE it as a badge of honour back in the day — my profound disdain for the Irish language.
It really was a visceral hate. And I wasn’t alone in despising my “native tongue”. Most of my school peers in the 1970s and 1980s loathed Irish too.
That’s because we weren’t taught it. Rather, the zealots in charge of keeping the “dying” language “alive” rammed it down our throats. It was a medicine we had no choice but to take.
But like all things unpalatable, sensible people spit it back out on the ground. The result of 12 years of Irish instruction: I can barely speak a sentence. Let’s just say I have more Dutch.
Which is a great, great shame. Irish is a beautiful, poetic language that we should all be speaking fluently without fear or hesitation. Instead, generations of citizens grew up alienated from their mother tongue.
There are many reasons. Awful teachers of course, who themselves didn’t understand the grammar nor the subtlety of the language.
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The whip and the rote, the twin towers of “learning Irish” in my day. Except no one learns a language like that.
For many of us who turned our backs on the language, myself included, Irish was, rightly or wrongly, the primary symbol of a repressive state. We had political pygmies for leaders. And they ran the country hand in hand with the Catholic church and the GAA.
Football, not GAA, was the sport of choice for most of us kids because there wasn’t a word of Irish anywhere to be seen. The GAA, on the other hand, was full of it. For many in my generation and in the generations before, the Irish language was synonymous with backwardness, shame and ignorance.
Speaking Irish well in some way validated de Valera’s Dancing At The Crossroads vision of Ireland. Comely maidens, thigh slapping and child abuse. That’s why so many of us revolted against it.
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I fought (verbally) with my Irish teacher for the first three years of secondary school. I was so disruptive, I spent most of the years 1982-1985 with my chair facing the back wall as punishment. What passed for Irish went in one ear and out the other, wilfully.
Our year was split into streams for the Leaving Cert years. The class my friends and I were cast into was so bad at the language that in our final year (1987) our teacher gave up and we played Hangman in Irish in the months leading up to our final exams.
Some of us took Honours Irish for a laugh on exam day. We had to stay in the exam hall for at least half an hour before leaving. The rush for the exits after 30 minutes summed up my generation’s attitude towards the language.
We all failed, and failed miserably. And we didn’t care a jot. To fail Irish was our little rebellion against the state and all it stood for.
REBORN AND COOL
All that has changed now, or so I’m told. Irish is no longer being taught as a dead language, but as a living one. It’s been like that for a long time too.
Unexplained grammar — the Modh Coinníollach (I only discovered recently it isn’t some mythical creature that lived with Peig Sayers on a mountainside in Kerry, but the Conditional Tense) — is no longer hammered home by constant repetition until your ears bleed.
Irish schools and colleges are thriving. The kids speak Irish to each other as French or German or Spanish kids would their own language. It is no longer a mystery, an enigma, a point of revolt. The language, on its knees and dying in the 1980s, is reborn and cool.
Why? Well, today’s Ireland is a long way from the repressive 1970s and 1980s. The closed world of Ireland back then is no more. Now, we are freer, happier, wordly wise, accepting, diverse. In short, a modern republic.
The ignorance that surrounded us and the blinkers most of us wore are gone, too. Ireland is now a vibrant multicultural nation in which the Irish language can thrive, and it is doing just that.
It’s no coincidence Ireland’s newest citizens, the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Brazilians, Brits and so on, are learning Irish and learning it easily, because they are being taught it the right way, and without the baggage of repression.
I’d love to learn the language from scratch all over again. The irony is that I was a linguist in school. French and German were my best subjects.
No reason why I couldn’t be fluent in Irish too. Language is what makes us different from everything else on this planet of ours.
And when we speak our own language, we are closer to who we really are. My hatred is gone. All I need is a good teacher.
LOCK UP PRONOUN WARRIOR
HOW in Christ’s name is sacked teacher Enoch Burke not in jail? Answers on a postcard to the High Court in Dublin.
After causing mayhem alongside his family down at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, during which Enoch, his brothers Isaac and Simeon, sister Ammi, mum Martina and dad Sean were all dragged out roaring and shouting by cops, Enoch rocked back up outside the school that fired him yet AGAIN on Wednesday morning.
The High Court already warned so-called “Pronoun Warrior” Enoch that he would be fined €700 every time he showed up at Wilson’s Hospital school in Multyfarnham, Co Westmeath. Since then, Burke has chalked up a bill of more than €28,000 and counting.
He doesn’t seem to mind how much the daily fines are hurting his pocket.
Well, he has yet to pay any of them, and the way this country works I’d be surprised if he ever has to hand over any money at all.
But that’s immaterial.
What’s important is that Enoch is in clear breach of High Court orders forbidding him to go to his former school. FORTY-ONE breaches so far.
Surely it’s time for the authorities to end this charade once and for all. They may be reluctant to make a martyr out of him, but enough is enough.
Next time he’s driven to school by his dad Sean, the cops should be there to make him accountable for his actions.
If not for justice then for the sanity of the rest of us.
OLYMPICS BETRAYAL
PARIS is the City of Light, the capital of the world (the Old World, that is), and to think that Russian athletes would be allowed to compete at the Olympics in the French capital is obscene and a two fingers up to all Paris stands for.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it wants to allow Russians to pole vault, run, row, swim, cycle and box in Paris next summer, which is an affront to all that is decent.
Russia – and its athletes – deserve nothing more than total isolation until the psychopath in the Kremlin is defeated and Ukraine is free again. But the IOC is an organisation that doesn’t live in the real world.
If Russia is there next summer, the Olympic Games will be forever tainted.
They say politics and sport shouldn’t mix.
In a world torn asunder by Russian evil, that sentiment is now utter b*ks.
MARKET CAN'T FIX HOUSING
TALK about digging your own electoral grave. Well, that’s what the Government did on Tuesday when they decided to end the ban on evictions at a time of a housing catastrophe (it is no longer a crisis, it’s worse than that).
Their rationale for allowing people to be dumped out on the streets: A fear landlords were exiting the market in great numbers because of the ban.
A memo brought to Cabinet by Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien warned that extending the eviction ban any longer would “further undermine (Landlords’) confidence in continuing their participation and growing their investment in the rental market”.
So, there ya have it. The heart of it all. Dollars for the big boys and girls (vulture funds of course). And the Government caved in.
They had no option other than to act as they did, of course, because this is a Government, as have been all governments for decades, that has trusted the MARKET to supply housing for citizens.
The state built damn all for decades and even now, when it’s easier to find a needle in a haystack than it is a room for rent, they are still not building enough houses, not by a long shot.
And that is, and has been, deliberate government policy. Let the private market solve what amounts to a social issue.
Doomed to failure from the get-go. The state MUST be front and centre in solving the biggest threat to the future prosperity of the nation.
Our best and brightest are leaving Ireland in their droves because it is next to nigh impossible to find an affordable place to live.
Until the Government realises that the state is the only entity that can solve the biggest problem this country has ever faced, then it is doomed to repeat the same mistakes that have been made for more than 40 years now and have led us to this sorry place.
The state must become the biggest landlord. The market just cares about the market.
If you don’t cop on to this truth then you are all in for an electoral drubbing next time out.
THE monsters in Putin’s evil army have no morality, no humanity and no self-awareness.
The merciless execution of unarmed Ukrainian PoW Tymofiy Shadura, above, as he puffs on his last cigarette in a shallow pit, left, reveals in all its horror the emptiness of Putin’s soul.
His captors force him to say Slava Ukraini (Glory To Ukraine) before strafing him with automatic fire. The killers then shared the footage on social media.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to hunt down Tymofiy’s murderers and bring them to justice for the war crime.
The execution is but one of thousands feared to have been committed by the Russians away from the cameras.
Thirteen months into their war and the brutality of what is transpiring each day in Ukraine continues to confound human understanding.