Pat Walsh's "A Rebel Act": Book Review

This biography covers all of this Irish poet's life and career. The subtitle may lead one to believe it's only about the period roughly from 1975-84 when Michael Hartnett's decision to no longer publish his poetry in English gained attention among Ireland's poetry, literary, and critical circles. But the tenth of the book devoted to this phase shows its importance and duration within the poet's 58 years.

Pat Walsh must have read everything ever mentioning Hartnett. His documentation records his consultation of the poet's manuscripts and notebooks, interviews, and press coverage down to quite rare small press publications or ephemeral journalism. He lets the poetry, the poet, and his contemporaries tell as much of the story as possible. Generous excerpts from Hartnett's verses, his own writings beyond poems, and his radio broadcasts also deepen any reader's appreciation of his work. Furthermore, while Walsh tends to stay in the background more as diligent compiler than as a critic with his own take on this difficult-to-categorize man, he judiciously includes criticism which calls Hartnett to task when warranted. For not all of his verses are up to the high standards of his best.

Complementing literary criticism produced on Hartnett, this fuller depiction of a dapper, erudite, coruscating, and forthright poet and presence during the 60s through some of the 80s reveals a deep care for the state of Ireland, regarding its heritage, its commitment or lack of to its long-denigrated "first official language," and Hartnett's determination to demonstrate by his own action his nuanced understanding of not only a language but a way of life and a manner of living and thinking which, for many in his Dublin audiences hearing him declaim his poems, must have been received with a mixture of reactions. Today when national identity, ethnic roots, international treaties, and corporate domination have markedly increased since Hartnett's era, this 2012 study is timely and trenchant. (Amazon Britain + US 7/30/17)

Michael McCaughan's "Coming Home": Book Review

Facing his mid-life crisis, Michael McCaughan explores his reunion with the Irish language he'd abandoned, along with most students in the 26 Counties during nearly the past hundred years. He begins his memoir as resigned as Ireland's majority: 'We have acquired a prayer, permission to go to the bathroom and an empty slogan.' (13) Sé do bheatha a Mhuire, an bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas and tiochfaidh ár lá. Throughout his career as a Spanish translator abroad, he'd regale Latin Americans who'd begged him to "say something in Irish" with a hodgepodge recited from rote.

Coming Home is a generic phrase itself. The book's subtitle: 'one man's return to the Irish language', situates him within a small shelf of similar stories, some cited, others not. Lonely Planet co-founder Brian Fallon left Boston on the same quest, a bit fictionalised as Home With Alice (2002). The fact this was published only in Australia may reflect the presumed limited appeal of this trope. That same year, Darerca Ní Chartúir in her overview-guide to the language appended testimonies from four Americans attending summer schools in Gaeltachtaí. Two years on, Ciarán MacMurchaidh edited 'Who Needs Irish?' A few learners answered why in the affirmative alongside acclaim by natives. and from a schooled minority who embraced the speech that McCaughan and many of his peers spurned.

I contributed to the 2007 issue of Estudios Irlandeses an examination of 'Making the Case for Irish Through English: Eco-critical Politics of Language by Learners' emphasising the perceived benefit of learning Irish in its natural setting. Brian Ó Conchubhair summed up in A New View of the Irish Language his 2008 chapter on 'The Global Diaspora and the "New" Irish (Language)'. He charted a 'hyper-Gaeltacht' (238) as Gaeilge entered its 'transnational' phase, sustained rather than attenuated by a combination of recent emigrants and the descendants of such, joined by other ethnicities connecting via Irish. Added to this in the decade since would be social media, video chat, and instant messaging.

Ó Conchubhair considers 'Hanson's law of third-generation return' first propounded in 1938: 'what the immigrant's son wishes to forget, the immigrant's grandson wishes to remember'. (New View 245) McCaughan, as one who has lived far from Ireland for much of his five decades, wonders why he took his Spanish from basics to fluency, while Irish languished. He puzzles over his surname and the silence from his Co Antrim-born father, who never revealed his side regarding sectarian origins, and the tug that pulls this son back. Dwelling in the Burren circa 2014, he takes advantage of Raidió na Gaeltachta online in caring for the 'fever' which inexplicably had consumed him to tackle, this time almost from scratch, another tongue. Union with this common resource unlocking centuries of lore past and present motivates his quest, rather than nationalism, Leaving Cert scores, or atavistic pride.

One wonders: within a multilingual Irish society, why Gaeilge shares craic in many a high street less often than, say, Polish? True, the exceptions of the immigrant, young or mature, who masters Irish gain publicity. But as one Irish wag mused, few of America's new arrivals hastened to study Cherokee or Seminole. If casual Irish does enter conversations, it's more likely within a congenial pub rather than a stern shop, (This is the reviewer's query; a minor flaw of this book is its too passing a coverage of this persistent social shame. Next to a continent where many citizens may communicate between four languages easily, the default refusal of most Irish to choose their native option continues to vex not only McCaughan and those he interviews and quotes. Compulsory lessons can't bear all the customary blame. And while a short glossary of Gaeilge terms and a brief list of sources consulted appear, the lack of an index thwarts recall of names, places and materials within this data-rich text.)

McCaughan wants to link in. Like learners can on the Net in the 'hyper-Gaeltacht', he keeps the radio on, plunging into 'the deep end' rather than rely on the English subtitles for TG4. Not far from the remnants of coastal districts where everyday Irish has been spoken, he considers the trauma of An Gorta Mór and the trace elements of guilt which weakened survivors. Remorse generated either a 'fierce, aggressive' attachment or rejection of the language, (22) He alludes to Animal Farm for the post-1922 'language bosses' who held on to their version of the tally stick, an bata scóir, emulating their hated English masters in beating on miscreants who lapsed into a forbidden but habitual tongue.

Either language was replaced with deliberate effort. McCaughan reasons that if Irish 'disappeared out of our families one word at a time', its erosion may be reversed by phrases enriching conversation. This as with much of the content assumes an Irish audience. Gill Books markets this to them, from the author's own birthplace of south Dublin. McCaughan therefore shares hints, resources, and strategies for those with the benefits of an Ireland residence to 'put on a second coat we've grown used to' (adapting composer Peadar Ó Riada's metaphor). McCaughan regards Irish as a 'second skin,' or even as what lingers in the 'marrow'. (64; readers may want to look up Peadar's father Seán's story.)

Exemplars such as Peadar, travel writer Manchán Magan, comedian Des Bishop, poets Paul Durcan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Michael Hartnett encourage him to distinguish his mother tongue, an Béarla, from his native one, an Ghaeilge. The fate of Hartnett, who tried to revert to Irish-only for his work, sobers him. McCaughan realises that the call to the mystic within will fall on many deaf ears around him, but he dismisses any practicality. As Spanish enraptured him as a teen, so now does Irish, at last. As well as tips for learners, this book's added value shows in the language policies from the Americas McCaughan uses to integrate his critique of the Dublin governments' hapless schemes.

Echoing Magan's Hartnett-like 'No Béarla' TG4 attempts in 2007 to conduct affairs in Ireland's 'first official language', the author tries to buy via Irish a ticket from Doolin to Inis Mór. He's told; 'you know, your Irish is very hard to understand.' Galwegians scold that he has 'no dialect'. Within the heartland, he considers a Buddhist analogue. Right Speech renders as 'what you say and how you say it is a reflection of a deeper truth'. (136) This illuminates his path. He ignores idealism; like many sojourners to these redoubts, he confronts a common impasse. Weary locals rebuff learners' attempts.

As this demonstrates, in the Gaeltacht, its public language becomes English; parents revert to Irish as a private medium; meanwhile children brought up as native speakers find themselves weakened by the influx of those relocating there with little or no Irish. At school, the classes may stay in public Irish, but McCaughan suspects children revert to English on their own watch, This imbalance presents a conundrum. To assist with their ancestral language the Irish people, who needs it most? Should entities support native communities or learners in urban centres, queuing at Gaelscoileannaí?

Contrasting the decision of most Irish to pay no more than lip service to Gaeilge, McCaughan credits the Zapatista movement, celebrating its indigenous and 'unbroken link to their ancestors' who use Tzeltal. The U'wa of Colombia choose their own too, rather than capitulate to the colonial imposition of Spanish. Proximity need not result in subservience or expediency; Central Europe and Scandinavia revived their local languages in the same period that millions of the Irish lost their own. McCaughan admits key revival differences historically and economically. Yet he seeks out a lively inspiration,

He strengthens his familial tie to the North of Ireland. The selfless attitude and volunteer spirit in Bóthar Seoighe infuses revival. State-designated enclaves mean simply places where Irish is spoken, But "the growth of Gaeilge in Belfast carries the mystique of a forbidden language spoken against the odds, and with a hint of subversive mischief'. (160) On the Falls Road, he sees more evidence of living Irish than in all of Dublin, Cork and Galway cities. Republican activists Michaél Mac Giolla Gunna, Féilim Ó hAdhmaill and Anthony McIntyre agree that their acquired Irish as crafted and transmitted in lessons 'behind the wire' conveyed a generosity imbued with true freedom. Their children, whether in class or at home, are growing up with both languages, with spontaneous poise.

This open-hearted reaction to Irish among those dubbed Nordies cheers this Ulsterman-once-removed.. Adults seek out Irish too, within not only West Belfast communities which welcome what was long persecuted. Ulster-Scots advocate Linda Ervine at the East Belfast mission started from far less than scratch. She conceives of her Irish-language endeavour as a 'vocation, an activity that needs to happen regardless of money'. (177) Their provincial roots tangle in garbled, anglicised place names and natural landmarks. West of Maghera, in south Derry, Gaeilge resurrects from this fresh soil, 'present yet invisible.' (198) At Carn Tóchair, this 'post-colonial option' cultivates a 'critical mass' of learners-to-speakers; what began with half a dozen in 1992 has grown to 180, young and old, fluent.

Niall Ó Catháin champions this líofacht enclave of those reuniting with this subterranean presence. For the Irish language 'was taken from us, and if we want it back we have to use it'. This bold grip reminds the writer of other surprising connections. Peadar Ó Riada tells McCaughan that in the tuneful townland of Cúil Aodha near Cork, a local, Lizzie O'Brien, was godmother to Sid Vicious.

McCaughan misses his chance here to nod to John Lydon's childhood visits to his own maternal domain in that very county. Derided then for his north London accent, he may today travel under an Irish passport, but he still bristles at being mocked for his tone. Lydon became infamous for rejecting many English symbols, as well as Catholic pieties. Ó Riada swirls Irish lyrics into world sounds. In their own ways, both play off a rebellious streak against clerics, some long supposed a Gaelic ally.

He seeks a decentralised Celtic Christian tradition, and as Lydon might accept, 'an atheist god if you like'. (209) If the North reveals the refusal at last to treat the accents in Irish as sectarian shibboleths, so Cúil Aodha suggests the native speaker's home advantage. Lydon and Ó Riada might concur that one born to the language applies his tongue unconsciously, as natural. This ease can never be totally gained by tutelage. It may single one out, depending on the setting, but it also anchors born speakers.

Concluding this journey around Ireland, McCaughan repeats the experience of others who have sought to find themselves through Irish. Native or learner, both find 'this is no country for Irish speakers'. (251) Relegated to the formulaic cúpla focal from a politician, a Republican and/or an Aer Lingus flight attendant, Gaeilge reveals its second-place status. The battle over Irish-only signage for An Daighean/ Dingle and the resentment from the tourist industry, second-home dwellers and visitors to Gaeilge amháin sa Ghaeltacht confirms the truth of McCaughan's charge. Yet he brandishes one cheery sign himself. The 'can-do philosophy' in the Six Counties epitomizes its 'brass nerve'. South of the border, this courage dwindles. Enlivened, McCaughan ends with a hope that one focal at a time, an Irish polity committed to diversity will sustain and nourish its native language, as its daily reality.

Dublin: Gill Books. 6 June 2017. ₤7.99/ € 14.99. 256 pp.

A bheith Gaeilge

Scríobh Anna Hoffman faoi an dúshlán a shábháil ar ár teanga ársa. Duirt sí ina Huffington Post go

raibh an lucht na Gaeilgoirí go mbeadh i dtrioblóid. De réir UNESCO, tá Gaeilge "cinnte i mbaol" anois.

Sainmhíonníon Cuan Ó Seireadáin ó Conradh na Gaeilge an faillí seo mar "béal grá." Mar sin, tá focaíl ach gan an ghníomh ann.  Aontaíonn Cian MacCárthaigh ó Raidió na Lífe go tugann An Rialtas na hÉireann ach "seirbhís liopa" leis an teanga oifigiúil.

Mar sin féin, cabhríonn an staísiún sin i mBaile Átha Cliath foghlaimeoirí. Tá gá le pobal a labhríonn an teanga le chéile, ar ndóigh. Measaim faoi mó chairde i nDroichead Átha ag fás leis Gaeilge.

Ar an lamh eile, ina Gaeltachtaí, tá an scéal gruama ansin. Nuair chuaigh mé go Dún na nGall ina tsamraidh 2007 a foghlaim Gaeilge ar feadh a coicís, ní raibh a daonra áitiúil a labhairt Gaeilge liom. B'fhéidir, dith orthu a labhairt Gaeilge ach amháin eatarthu féin. ach tá sin chuid den fhadhb, cinnte.

Meabhríonn Hoffman dúinn go labhairt "a bheith Gaeilge." Tá sé níos mó ná labhairt. Oidhreacht muid stór ríluachmhar a choiméad beo.

"To Have Irish"

Anna Hoffman writes about the challenge to save our ancestral language. She tells in the Huffington Post that the share of Irish-speakers may be in trouble. According to UNESCO, Irish is "definitely endangered" now.

Cuan Ó Seireadáin of Conradh na Gaeilge defines this neglect as "mouth-love." That is, there are words but no action. Cian MacCárthaigh of Raidió na Lífe agrees that the Irish government gives but "lip service" to the official tongue.

Nevertheless, that station in Dublin helps learners. There is need for a community to speak the language together, of course. I think of my friends in Drogheda growing up with Irish.

On the other hand, in the Gaeltachts, there is a dire situation there. When I went to Donegal in summer 2007 to study Irish during a fortnight, the local people did not want to speak Irish with me. Perhaps, there was a wish to speak Irish only between themselves, but that's part of the problem, sure.

Hoffman reminds us that we speak "to have Irish." This is more than speaking it. We inherit a priceless treasure to keep alive. (Photo/Grianghraf i mBéal Feirste Iarthar/in West Belfast; {"Labhairt cibé Gaeilge atá agat/Speak whatever Irish you have"})

Fergal Mac Ionnrachtaigh's "Language, Resistance and Revival": Book Review

What motivates families with little money and often no upbringing in their ancestral language to send their children off to schools to be taught in it? Why would prisoners, English-speaking from birth, teach each other that challenging language, given few resources and violent retribution? What links these two communities of activists, in the context of Belfast and the Irish North?

A participant-observer from West Belfast, Dr Fergal Mac Ionnrachtaigh reports on the background, the theory, and the practice of how the Irish language movement endured and revived. A product of its first Irish-medium schools, he blends scholarship with testimony in "Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland". Former prisoners and local families have a say. The personal as the political, with bilingual transcripts of interviews, enhances the impact of this accessible--if being Pluto Press, academic--grassroots survey.

After criminologist Phil Scraton's lively introduction, the author expands from his experience to post-colonial theories of language decline, nationalism, ideology, socialism, and identity. "Language loss does not occur within communities of power, wealth and privilege." The diminution of Irish, he adds, was not by choice when that choice had been denied so many citizens under British rule.

A chapter on the language's past fate critiques any purported "advantages of cultural assimilation" asserted by revisionists and imperialist entities, whether traditional or neo-liberal. Treatment of Protestant and republican revivalists, and the Gaelic League's attempt for "cultural reconquest", while familiar to students of this topic, assist new inquirers. The "Orange State" 1922-1972 backlash follows (an epilogue documents current provincial complaints). Mac Ionnrachtaigh examines "Hidden Ulster" that managed via the Catholic-leaning Comhaltas Uladh and locally a radicalised Cumann Chluain Ard which, alienated from the official state for a generation, encouraged Shaw's Road, the start of Belfast's urban Gaeltacht. From the Civil Rights era, that self-help initiative led to today's thriving schools and centres.

Learning Irish in prison, a more intense process than in streets or schools, marks resistance. As "a practical means of power" a second language undermined authority and cemented collective labels on those who championed political rather than criminal status at Long Kesh or other British prisons. This continued a cherished means of opposition from Fenian, IRB, and "old IRA" times, as inmates chose Irish as their linguistic as well as ethnic allegiance. In "Na Cásanna" or the 1973-84 Long Kesh internment cages during 1973-84, prisoners (including the author's father) explained, however, learning it paled next to playing football. Yet his father, and many others, mastered some Irish; Bobby Sands' example motivated many.

After the hunger strikes, Irish persisted. By the end of the '70s, blanketmen had forged an identity against surveillance and brutality. Pupils became teachers in turn, strengthening solidarity. Séanna Breathnach elaborates that even if inevitably "people were learning Irish from people who had no Irish at all before they came in", this provided a incentive "of gaining mental emancipation".

Sinn Féin encouraged classes in Belfast, Derry and Armagh. This study tends to be very Belfast-focused, but this may be inevitable given Long Kesh's proximity to that city's cultural prominence. There, illegal Irish-language street signs and the newspaper Lá symbolised change. Pádraig Ó Maolchraoibhe in 1985 boasted: "Now every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle." Schools (where the author began mid-'80s) made Irish a living language, taught often by ex-prisoners. Aodán Mac Póilin cautioned against a tight fit between republicans and the language; as with the Catholic Church, such associations weakened wider "ownership" of Irish and invited British hostility.

In conclusion, after narrating debates over the role of Irish and the risks and rewards of politicisation during the past decades, Mac Ionnrachtaigh places his research findings in context. Similar to a complementary study (uncredited as that appeared just prior to this) by another Ph.D. schooled in Irish during this same era, Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost's"Jailteacht" [Amazon + Estudios Irlandeses reviews by me], Mac Ionnrachtaigh concurs that incarceration sparked what earlier Gaelic Leaguers, for instance, had lacked: the incentive behind bars "to organise and sustain educational development in unfavourable circumstances". Finally, for Irish today as more learn it in school and try to use it in daily life, its inherent power enlivened its use beyond prison. That communal energy, harnessed through its return after long absence to more Irish homes and communities, demonstrates a renewed "space of resistance" emboldened by "highly political manifestations of decolonisation". (11/27/13 to Amazon US and Britain; slightly altered 12-20-13 for Slugger O'Toole)

Oona Frawley's "Memory Ireland: History & Modernity": Book Review

This first of four volumes explores the replacement of chronological historiography with a more fluid, less rigid approach that investigates what is remembered from the Irish past. Oona Frawley edits a wide-ranging and deliberately open-ended collection of scholarly essays. Contributors share no single approach, so the results may therefore appeal more to researchers seeking articles on their own particular interests in this anthology.
"Memory and History" by Barbara A. Misztal introduces theory, but she does not explore the Irish academic shift as recently "enhanced by the cultural turn in history" in any detail. Next, Frawley's essay applies cultural memory to an Irish postcolonial context. She defines this type of memory as "remembrance among social groups that manifests itself in multiple forms and relies upon acts of narration." She incorporates a "narrative imperative" that traces how scripts and schemas develop, but again the specific examples from Irish fiction are scarcer than one might expect. These are generally mentioned in one paragraph, with no details, compared to the theoretical discussion, which takes up nearly all of her entry.

A section on "Remembrance and Forgetting in Early and Premodern Irish Culture" opens with Christopher Ivic's study of early modern Irish "collective memory," and here the chronicler Edmund Campion gains extended attention, for his audience and his aim: to undermine the "Old English," that is, the Catholic settlers in Ireland who had been hibernized and therefore degraded, as opposed to the reforming English in the wake of the Reformation. Ivic concludes with a look at Geoffrey Keating's Foras feasa ar Éirinn, a rebuttal to both the older and newer English historians and polemicists.

Mary Helen Thuente ponders the harp "as a palimpsest of cultural memory," and illustrations would have complimented her informative survey well; this volume (in galley as reviewed) lacks all but one instance of a visual compliment. Guy Beiner documents clearly the revivals and revocations (as "social amnesia") around the failed Irish rebellion of 1798, the "Year of the French," which sparked the two-century campaign for republicanism. He contrasts the centenary's commemorations with those of folk memory, and how the evangelical and pro-British Ulster population often resisted, contested, or erased traces of their role in the nationwide uprising a century before.

Máirín Ní Cheallaigh examines another struggle. How did women help to preserve a much more attenuated memory, that of preserving archeological monuments in the nineteenth century? Antiquarians tended to be male, so female participation in this conservation and restoration project has been ignored.

Modernity enters with Malcolm Sen's situating memory studies into Ireland's "fractured, semicolonial" entrance into late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century orientalist, spiritualist, and antiquarian debates. The Celtic Revival bloomed, and with it, political as well as cultural ideologies that sought change, as they "sacralized" the project of nation-building. The playwright John Millington Synge and the politician Charles Stewart Parnell enter P. J. Mathews' chapter, two "unconventional Anglo-Irish gentleman" who shared a County Wicklow origin, who sparked controversy over sexual morality, and who left an Ireland divided by the people's response to their impact.

Anne Dolan raises the vexed questions around what is remembered about the wars for Irish independence. One preceded and one followed; the victory by the rebels had left the island partitioned and the new republic bitterly divided between republicans who fought against those who accepted a partially free Irish state. Dolan digs into the National Archive accounts to unravel in one famous case who was an informant, who angered the I.R.A., and what happened to policemen murdered as a result. She compares the memorialization of the dead of the first war, 1919-21, with those killed in the civil war of 1922-23.

One revolutionary who survived, the one who led the resistance, Éamon de Valera, himself left a vexing legacy in Irish memory. His longevity and cunning allowed him to blur what was remembered with what was current. Mary E. Daly neatly compiles the way de Valera was both "practioner and interpreter, guardian of the living record" as living history himself, eventual leader of the Irish nation he fought for, against, and then presided over for decades.

In an Ireland proclaiming freedom but still repressed, Emilie Pine uncovers another long-lived institution, the Magdalen Laundries. These religiously-run workhouses kept "fallen women"-- a term loose enough to include those mothers pregnant out of wedlock-- and were part of the network of orphanages and industrial schools were such children might be confined. Women as "penitents" were signed away to the laundries by "a family member and a parish priest." Some stayed there the rest of their lives. Pine studies three fictional representations in film and print alongside other depictions of this carceral Irish subculture, and she fairly notes their exaggerations as well as truths.

The Abbey Theatre stands for an Ireland that the outside world felt better about celebrating as "typical" of its culture. Holly Maples in a solid essay shows how the financial crisis of that theatre, around the time of its centenary, added to its woes, for it had long been--at least in Ireland itself--criticized as being in decline. As opposed to decline, David Cregan finds "Pink Power" among recent movements for equality seeking to reclaim homosexual pride in a country too long determined to suppress its manifestations.

In an inventive essay, Irish-language scholar Brian Ó Conchubhair pairs the post-9/11 war on terror with the paranoia that sparked F.B.I. fears. A couple conversing in Gaelic in Chicago, Fourth of July 2002, were taken in by the Feds as Arabic speakers. So the story went, spreading in the press and on the Net. But it was a hoax. Ó Conchubhair places this anecdote within an examination of how Irish nationalists using the other native (or learned, sometimes in prison) language have been suspected by the British authorities.

Multiculturalization, a feature of recent Irish life, complicates narratives of a cohesive, nationalist origin for the Irish today. Lorraine Ryan takes on how immigrants into, as opposed as out of, Ireland challenge the norms. She critiques the Celtic Tiger rhetoric as itself biased in how it reduces and suppresses an Irish past with racism and injustice. She favors an Ireland ready to incorporate the rest of the world into how it remembers its past and builds up its future.

Finally, the afterward by Irish-language critic Alan Titley turns back to "The Great Forgetting," when the destruction of the traditional culture accompanied the rapid erosion of its original language. After the famine, retrieving what Gaelic locked in itself became difficult for generations raised with English. The language shift wiped out folk memory for many families. Silence became preferable to speaking in Irish, which was punished in British-run schools, seen as backward, a sign of poverty in a nation resigned to immigration to survive. Instead of bilingualism, as in many European or colonial counterparts, the Irish speakers "atrophied and localized," until they could no longer easily understand each other, cut off by regions into dialects. Even today, as Titley might agree with Ó Conchubhair, the relegation of Irish speakers if not as subversives than as marginalized continues, in an Ireland that so many other contributors examine as European, globalizing, and diverse. (Featured 12-31-10 at New York Journal of Books )

Mo chuid den Gaeilge

"Tá dul an Bhéarla ar a cuid Gaeilge." Chuir Dónal agam seo leis a mhúinteoir. Tá mé ag socrú ag bhainnean leis seo, chomh d'inis mé orm ar Leabhar Aghaidh inné.

Ag foghlaim Gaeilge nuair foghlameoir fásta go bhfuil deacair a dhéanamh. Ar ndóigh, tá nios deacra nuair cónaithe thar leor. Ní fhaigheann mé Gaeilge ar an bóthar go rialta; ní chloiseann mé sé ar an raidio go coitanta.

Ar scor ar bith, bím ag foghlaim Gaelige inniu! Ar beagán ar bheagán, tá duine eile ag foghlaim de na tíortha thar lear. Téann muid go Éirinn agus ag cónai ar an gcoigríoch gach lá.

Measaim go mbeadh is deacra ag spreagúil Gaeilge ar ball. Tá duine éagsúla ag teacht go Éirinn anois ar an domhain. Maítheadh an scrúdú ar scoil díobh go minic go nádúrtha. Mar sin, beidh mic léinn níos lu ag foghlaim Gaeilge ansin.

Níl aon amhras faoi. Tá dúshlán crua. Nílim ábalta déanamh freagra furasta ann.

Is mór a d'athraigh an tír. Tá athrach saoil ann. Níl tú ábalta fáil fíor-Gaeltacht ach in an rang dhían nó an brionglóid Fhiannach Phiarais. Tá fhíos acu ag rá as Béarla sa deireadh in Éirinn go luath.

Sa chéad chás de, ní fhillfear go brúidiúilacht múinteoira chomh san am a chuaigh thart triu Éirinn. Tógtar rogha a bhaint a foghlaim agus úsaid Gaeilge go saor. Os a choinne sin, b'fhéidir bheadh a bheith pobal le taobhú an teanga dhúchais seo gach lá agus amárach leis bród ina h-áit dhúchais.

Mar sin féin, chuala mé faoi deireanach (nasc: "Palma Nova") de réir abairt le cailín in An Droichead Nua. D'inis sí chuig mo chairde, a tuismitheoirí: "Iarraim gach duine in Éirinn ag labhairt as Gaeilge nuair go mbeidh mé ceannaire na h-Éirinn!" Gheofá sí breith a bhéil féin.

My share of Irish.

"The English's going from your share of Irish," (literal); "Your Irish has the shape of English" (figurative). Dan sent me this from his teacher. I'm in agreement concerning this, as I told him on FaceBook yesterday.

Learning Irish when an adult learner's hard to do. Of course, it's harder when living abroad. I don't see Irish on the road regularly; I don't hear it on the radio daily.

However, I'm studying Irish today! Little by little, there's other people learning from the lands overseas. We're going to Ireland to study but living elsewhere every day.

I judge it may be most difficult encouraging Irish in the future. There's different people coming into Ireland now from all over the world. They're granted exemption in school often, naturally. Therefore, there'll be fewer students learning Irish there.

There's no doubt about it. This is a tough challenge. There's no easy answer I can make.

The country's changed a lot. Times have transformed there. You're not able to find a pure-Irish-speaking area but in a strictly-disciplined classroom or Pearse's Fenian dream.

On the one hand, one will not return to brutality of a teacher as in times past through Ireland. Let somebody take a choice to learn and use Irish freely. On the other hand, perhaps the community should support this mother tongue every day and tomorrow with proper-pride in its native habitat.

All the same, I heard recently (link: "Palma Nova") about a sentence from a little girl in Drogheda. She told my friends, her parents: "I want everyone in Ireland speaking in Irish when I will be president of Ireland!" May she get her wish!

Image/ íomhá: "Acht Gaeilge, Aon Duine?"/Irish-language Act, Everyone?/ Ógra Shinn Féin. Le 'MacSaonordú'. 23 Feabhra/Feb. 2009. "Foghlaim Gaeilge, Aon Duine?"

Talk Irish: “Labhair Gaeilge”

Tá suíomh nua faoi ag labhairt Gaeilge ann. Mar sin é, go bhfuil “Labhair Gaeilge” seisean féin ann. Gheobhaidh tú ag fáil áiteannaí éagsúlaí ann. Tá clachtaí ag léamh leis laomcartaí, focal an lae, agus foclóir ansin, mar shampla.

Cruinníonn sé is maith freisin. Measaim go mbeadh ionad go luach. Feicfidh tú naisc go leor.

Éist leis Liam Ó Maonlaí ag muintir ortsa féin. Gáire leis Deis Mac an Easpaig ag mágadh faoi gaeilgoirí chomh muidsa! Ceap leis Fearghal Mac Uiginn ó “Gíota Beag” agus “Beag eile” triu an BBC-NI. Clois leis “Raidio Fáilte” i mBéal Feirste Thiar.

Is blog é fós. Is féidir leat scríobh post a sciar roinn leis duine eile. Tá scéim níos éasca a úsaid ansin.

Is maith liom an dearaigh seo anseo. Déanann sé ag cabhair foghlaimeoirí fásta chomh mise féin. Ar scor ar bith, b’fhéidir mac leinn níos óg go mbíonn cur cuairt ansiud go minic níos coitanta.

Is acmhainn é úr agus geal. Smaoinim go raibh “Labhair Gaeilge” go mbeidh ag fás níos mo go luath. Gan dabht, tíocfaidh mé ar ais anseo aríst.

D’inis mo chara orm faoi “Labhair Gaelige” inne. Bhí mé ag marcáidh an tionscail seo cheana féin. Fillfidh mé ar an cúil sin go rialta.

Bheul, ar teacht isteach liom arsean féin? Tabhair sracfhéachaint tusa feín air anois. Creidim go fail stór focal agus taisce fuaim ar ball beag.

Talk Irish: “Labhair Gaeilge.”

There’s a new site for speaking Irish. That is, there’s “Talk Irish” itself. You’ll find various places there. There’s lessons for reading with flashcards there, a word of the day, and a dictionary, for example.

It’s designed well too. I reckon that it may be a valuable location. You will see links galore.

Listen with Liam Ó Maonlaí teaching you yourself. Laugh with Des Bishop mocking about Gaeilgoirí like ourselves! Think with Fearghal Mac Uiginn from “A Wee Bit” and “Another Bit” through BBC-NI. Hear Radio Welcome” in West Belfast.

There’s a blog also. It’s simple to write a post to share with other people. It’s a very easy set-up to use there.

I’m pleased with this design here. It’s made for helping adult learners like myself. However, perhaps younger students may visit over there often more habitually.

It’s a resource fresh and bright. I think that “Talk Irish” may be growing more soon. Without a doubt, I will come back here again.

A friend told me about “Talk Irish” yesterday. I’ve marked this project already. I will return to that nook regularly.

Well, would you be agreeing with me on this? Give it a glance yourself now. I believe that you may find a storehouse of words and a treasure of sounds in but a short while.

Yiddish Curses, Irish Blessings

213 hits for "Yiddish curses," to date at The Forward. The Feb. 20 issue (we get it typically one Shabbat late out here three thousand miles away as if by Pony Express), has its customarily engaging mix of intellectual and social commentary on Members of the Tribe. Yesterday I wrote about Irish being placed in the "definitely endangered" category of languages by UNESCO; last evening I read in the Forward half a dozen articles about the revival of Yiddish. One of its leading advocates in New York theatre, moreover, is one Caraid O'Brien, an immigrant from The Old Sod.

Teddy Wayne reviews, in that rather smarmy trying to be witty tone that more than one journalist adopts for the paper-- perhaps they have a new editorial slant to match their jazzier website, which still gave me a dead link to last week's issue, thus my archive search-- a book of Yiddish insults. Not the first. Sounds strange to credit the author as "one of the first six female rabbis in the United States." After a point, this self-congratulatory "I got there in first, I meant sixth place" gets tedious. Anyway, I'm sure she shares her nachas and both her zaydes kvelled and fressed until they shvitzed reducing themselves utterly ferklempft.

That's practically half the Yiddish I know. I wish my late bubbe-in-law had taught me and my boys some more filthy phrases than these. My dear wife may well correct me; I did buy her "Born to Kvetch" as a present a couple of years back. I guess she knows about as much Gaeilge as I do her attenuated mamaloshen. Fits us, assimilated but still curious about our romanticized forebears in their ghettoes and bogs, grumbling as they must have about the weather, the neighbors, and their God. In my apparently if understandably nearly lone efforts to record whatever Internet Irish-Yiddish connections which I can excavate, I now glean from Wayne's musings.

If the classic Yiddish imprecation has an inverse, it is the Irish blessing. While the Gaelic bards gaily start benedictions with “May…” before politely wishing their recipient good fortune (“May the wind be always at your back; May the sun shine warm upon your face”), the Yiddish curse is a spell of invective, typically cast with the conditional “You should…” prior to the litany of ill tidings (“You should get windburn and a melanoma”).

As a compendium of these and other such Yiddishisms, “Talk Dirty Yiddish” by Ilene Schneider (Adams Media, 2008), who is one of the first six female rabbis in the United States, has a somewhat misleading title that may disappoint a gutter-minded Hebrew-school vonts (a bedbug; figuratively, a mischievous child). The series — there are “Talk Dirty” books for French and Spanish — is actually a primer on general slang. And except for one chapter in the Yiddish installment, there is very little schmutz (physical or metaphorical dirt).

Instead, the book surveys subjects integral to the Jewish experience: food, the body, public life, celebrations and tragedy (the last of which, not surprisingly, fills up one more page than celebrations). Additional chapters cover proverbs, names, ethnicity, insults, profanities and, perhaps most interestingly, words that have bled into English.
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The glossary of Yinglish words and other hybrid phrases is similarly enlightening. For example, “gunsel” in common usage is “an armed gangster,” but the original definition is “a young homosexual hobo who was partners with an old tramp.” I’ll be sure to bring up the latter connotation at the 2009 conference for Etymologists of Cross-Generational Gay Vagrant Lifestyles.
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A complete index for quick alphabetical access might also be helpful to take us from ayngefedemt (literally, to thread a needle; a euphemism for sexual intercourse) to zaftig (see: Knightley, Keira, opposite of). Then again, I’m sounding like a kvetching knaker (know-it-all). Such a breezy, engaging book, I should be so lucky to write. Ilene Schneider, mazel tov.

The photo I chose from this issue carries no Yiddishkeit. However, my past image searches have exhausted the few Irish-Yiddish comparisons (all one?) in previous posts. So, printed from the same issue, this 1931 photo by Martin Munkasci of dancers “Tibor von Halmay and Vera Mahlke” graces the page. But, I found it complete over here. The Forward's own shot of this cropped (I suspect) pre- or post-coital Vera, leaving only half her head. Maybe they had to cut out My Girl Lollipop chomping in her chemise on an illegal, immoral, or unhealthy if unidentifiable stash-- hashish? qat? chaw of tobacco? fudge? Alice B. Toklas brownie?-- but it did leave the composition, well, hanging. And what's that shadow of Tibor's portend? Is that his tongue or a cigar protruding? I wonder if Fred Astaire found inspiration from this Magyar's murally challenged feat?

De ghlór an bháis?

Scríobh Caitríona Ní Dhonghaile ina nuachtan "Eireannach Neamhspléach" 20 Feabhra faoi tuarascáil nua le UNESCO. Duirt siad go bhfuil Gaeilge "ag cur i gcontúirt go cinnte" é. Mar sin, ní fhoghlaimíonn sé mar príomhteanga ina bhaile leis duine ar bith.

Ar scor ar bith, insíonn UNESCO go raibh ag cur "i mbaol" mar Baisceis, Gaeilge na hAlban, agus Breatnais. Níl é seo chomh olc. Faigheann an triú na teangachaí bás atá ag druidim leis anois. Chuala mé go imeacht leathan na teangachaí ar fud an domhan sa céad againn féin.

Ar ndóigh, tá bron ormsa féin go leor faoi an tuarisc seo. Ar feadh an seachtain seo caite, léigh mé freagra ó Nigel Ó Ceallacháin orm. Is foghlaimeoir fásta é na Gaeilge (Oideas Gael chomh mise!) agus Breatnais níos formhór. Chonaic mé alt go scríofa leis Nigel ina leabhar go léamh mé anois, "Breatnais sa Bhliain" leis Jen Llewelyn.

D'fhoglaim sé Breatnais go foirfe. Tá sé i gcónaí ina An Bhreatain Beag anois. Oibríonn sé leis ducháis Breatnaise gach lá. Is é leathanach baile anseo. Tá Nigel go bhfuil duine dea-shamplach go raibh muineadh dúil ar aghaidh againnsa eigin.

Bhí seanathair Breatnais airsean féin ina bhaile. Bhí seantuismeitheoraí Gaeilge acu mise féin. Ní déanfaidh duine níos mo i bhfad ó láthair nó de chóir baile fiú amháin an dushlan mór a foghlaim teangachaí Ceilteach amárach. Níl deireadh dúile bainte de agam fós. Tagann muid briathra deireanacha.

In a dying voice?

Katharine Donnelly wrote in the newspaper "Irish Independent" 20 February about a new report by UNESCO. They say that the Irish language's "definitely endangered" [="put into danger surely"]. That is, it is not learned at home as a primary language by anybody.

However, UNESCO tells that Basque, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh are put in the "unsafe" category. This is not as bad. A third of languages find death approaching now. I heard half of languages all over the world will go away in our own century.

Of course, I myself was very sad about this report. During the past week, I read a reply to me from Nigel Callaghan. He's an adult learner of Irish (Oideas Gael like me!) and moreover Welsh. I saw an essay that was written by Nigel in a book I am reading now, "Welsh in a Year," by Jen Llewelyn.

He learned Welsh perfectly. He lives in Wales now. He works in the Welsh-language homeland every day. Here is his homepage. Nigel is a fine example of a person who may inspire an expectation to progress within some of us.

He had a grandfather with Welsh himself in the home. I myself had grandparents with Irish. Fewer people from afar or even close at home will make the great struggle to learn Celtic tongues tomorrow. I have not yet given up hope of it. We revive dying words.

Photo/ Griangraf: "Stair, Láthair, agus Todhchaí Athbheochan na Gaeilge i mBéal Feirste" le/ "Past, Present, and Future Revival of Irish in Belfast" by Harry Holland, Glór na Móna, (="Voice of the Turf"= lost in translation?) 2007. Tá muid ag plé faoi Gaeilge as Béarla. Tosaíonn muid go mall. Caitheann muid cloí leis an bhfírinne. We discuss Irish in English. We start slowly. We must stick to reality.

Michael Hartnett & Celtic Refusal

In my last entry, I reviewed Emyr Humphreys' "The Taliesin Tradition"; it reminded me afterwards of lines by Michael Hartnett, who for a decade followed through on his promise to bid "Farewell to English." He wrote his own verse only in Irish, while translating Ó Bruadair, Ó Rathaille and Haicéad. Raised by his Kerry-born grandmother not far from where I once stayed at Ballingarry in rural Limerick, Hartnett resolved in 1975 to reclaim himself as Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide, in homage to her speech. She sprinkled Irish into her English such that the little boy had no idea in Camas, a townland south of the home of Ballygowan water, Newcastle West, that his nation's "first" language was anything less than alive, from her fluency.

Although he flunked out of UCD, and claimed to have fathered his three children not only by a "Jewish Englishwoman" (this to get a rise out of his listener) and another by a "black woman living in Russia" (his daughter confesses ignorance of any such half-sibling), this troubled poet, who died (1999) as so many prematurely due to drink, remains one of our most eloquent voices that continue, across the Celtic Sea, the tradition Humphries hears in his principality's poets.

This continuity with a more nature-rooted, localized, literate, and sensitively tuned culture may often be mocked in its New Age druidic dress-up costume. It's given the mask for a few who have committed violence in its cause. It's allowed hucksters to market shamrockery and Cool Cymru to deluded diasporas and incomers, not to mention tourists there and abroad. However, this turn towards a healing past within which those who might mutter about their identity that they're mutts, or only "white," or nothing much, may, as Humphreys and Hartnett insist, prove crucial to rescue us from our own complacency. We rush into cultural oblivion at the manipulation of a branded, corporate, and centrally controlled machinery. My own increasingly standardized, semi-cyberspatial, and mediated occupational status witnesses to Hartnett's reaction towards "total work" and Humphreys' specter of a row of humans as lightbulbs, plugged into a circuit, blinking or dimming on command.

Asked by a student yesterday, in our ubiquitous "blended" delivery mode-- half "on-site" in classroom, half "on-line"-- about my own views of technological progress, I cited Humphries' phrase, which I'd found only a night before. I tend towards caution, even as I rely on this medium to share what I'm thinking with you as well as them. My tasks and my research merge, on this vexed but convenient channel of communication and surveillance. My investigations into Celtic identity bring me unexpectedly face-to-face with my employment. A Welsh roots-radical (b. 1919) informs my course in "Technology, Culture & Society" that I teach once or twice per now- compressed, accelerated, efficiently commodified (meeting market demands) term.

Fewer caught up in our demanding pace probably do what Hartnett or Humphreys did last century: immerse themselves into "our" language legacy. Hartnett's plunge into Irish lasted awhile, but he surfaced back to English via haiku-- like his Limerick counterpart Gabriel Rosenstock, also skilled in Irish translations and inspirations from the East. Humphreys-- inspired by Saunders Lewis' part in the 1936 Penyberth protest (about which I will muse more soon, once I corner the elusive "A Nation on Trial" by Dafydd Jenkins)-- learned Welsh, so well that he not only wrote his own books but directed films or plays in Cymraeg. For those too far distant from any Gaeilge grandmother or a Cymric firebrand to spark us, our process of cultural recovery chugs slowly, one verbal paradigm, one vocabulary list, one phrase at a time snatched from so many obligations and distractions in this lightbulb circuit.

I lack much recall of much of what I read, especially poetry, too little of which I read. Still, Hartnett's phrases stuck. Looking for this quote, I found it still bookmarked--with a post-it also of the final words I cite below-- from twenty years ago when I found it in Seán Dunne's "Poets of Munster." The village where Hartnett was born (1941), Croom, was the center centuries ago of some of the best and last bards from what Daniel Corkery called "The Hidden Tradition" of the twilight of Irish poets, continuing a legacy very like that of Taliesin and revived by Humphreys and such as Saunders Lewis in a manner very much like what Hartnett seeks here:

"A Farewell to English" (1975; excerpt from start of part 6)

"Gaelic is the conscience of our leaders,
the memory of a mother-rape they will
not face, the heap of bloody rags they see
and scream at it in their boardrooms of mock oak.
They push us towards the world of total work,
our politicians with their seedy minds
and dubious labels, Communist or
Capitalist, none wanting freedom--
only power. All that reminds us
we are human and therefore not a herd
must be concealed or killed or slowly left
to die, or microfilmed to waste no space.
For Gaelic is our final sign that
we are human, therefore not a herd."

Photo: more info about Hartnett from his publisher: Gallery Press.

Contrasting Hebrew & Gaelic Revivals.

In Lazarus Tongues in Israel & Ireland," the language columnist "Philologos" shares the insights of U. of Delaware grad student Kevin Barry who compares the Gaelic Revival, or its lack, with the success of the Hebrew triumph for Israel. Philologos, writing in the Dec. 19th 2008 issue of The Forward, our national Jewish weekly paper, naturally controls the court for Hebrew, but Barry helps assist with his Irish expertise. Barry's arguments may not widen the comparative presentation as much as I'd crave, but it's useful to have these sensible discussions condensed for a popular (by my standards) audience.

Many observers of Ireland's language death and resuscitation-- at least in passing-- have wondered: why not only Hebrew, but even Scandinavian languages, or Czech, or Hungarian: how did these recover in the 19c Europe when German, for instance on the Continent, appeared so dominant in terms of empire and education, jurisdiction and imposition? Why didn't the Irish rebel by reverting to their own native tongue, to reject English in the same patriotic manner as many in Mitteleuropa? For that matter, why did Welsh thrive in this same period, and why's it still much healthier today, despite a much longer lag in state-sponsored support, vs. the Republic's eighty-odd years in institutionalizing its promotion in schools, signage, and the civil service?

P.S. I left this comment on-line at The Forward:

Thanks for an informative column, as usual. One factor that Barry probably stressed in his original paper: the negative mindset associated with the pre-independence British-imposed school punishment that punished the Irish-speaking children with wearing a "tally stick" that'd be passed on to the next child caught talking in Irish (a similar "Welsh not" was the norm in Wales at this time). Such methods inculcated further the notion in parents and their offspring that Irish needed to be eliminated so that English, and progress, could advance. It's also noteworthy that mid-19c, it was estimated only about fifty people could write in Irish; contrast this with the rich oral-- and recorded-- traditions of Hebrew.

Photo: I looked mighty long for an Irish-language t-shirt of the Red Sox, "Stocaí Deargaí," and here 'tis. You can buy it and hundreds more Sox gear at Yawkey Way Store outside Fenway Park. A student of mine was a Boston fan and he directed me thus. The Hebrew version accompanies it.

Sorry to Niall who worships the Lakers, but I admit my loyalty tilts to the Celtics ever since I was a kid. The collapse of the Celtics yesterday in the final minutes, 13-2 outscored, that enabled the Lakers to win by eleven discouraged me, but as we were able to watch some of the opening game when lunching at Harris Ranch (I had veggie soup at that meat emporium, but I like the fruit crate art framed there), I could see how the Lakers had the energy, the determination, and that home court advantage.

Niall and I agree, however, that the Red Sox can remain a second choice after the Dodgers. As tomorrow's entry documents, matching Irish with Hebrew in any image hunt produces a paucity of useful illustrations.

Ag lorg ar stór as Gaeilge.

Plé Ó Muiri faoi na áthas domhain 'meitfisiciúil' ag foghlaim Gaeilge. Aointaim leis scribhneoir seo. Léighim a lhéirmheas is fada de leabhar "Radharc Nua Gaeilge" bealach Gaelport.com inné.

Insionn sé faoi ábhar níos deacair áfach. Admhaíonn sé féin: "Tá foghlaimeoiraí go leor Ghaeilge-- agus cuirim mise féin-- a ní déanann, anois agus aríst-- níorbh aon ionadh leo faoi go mbeadh greim go daingean ag úsaid ar an teanga acusan." Deir Ó Muiri agaibh go bhfuil sé an foghlameoir freisin!

Chuir mé mo h-alt ar blog seo faoi an léirmheas areir. Smaoiním futhú inniu. Ní féidir a shéanadh nach ag obair leis Gaeilge go rabthar furasta nuair thar lear.

Cén fáth? Bhuel, ní fheicim comharthaí éagsulaí ag timpeall mé nuair ag tiomaint. Ní chloisim clárannaí dífrúilaí ar an raidió gach lá. Ní fhaighim scannán dátheangach ar an teilifís gach oiche. Tá an fhírinne faoi seirbhis as Gaeilge go deireanach ar an idirlíon. Tá mé ábalta breith orthu beagán díobh ann.

Mar sin féin, tá sé dúshlán mór. Tá iontas liom faoi mo luach saothair. B'fhéidir, bheadh imoibriú inchasta. Tagaim i réim athuair clainne. Is máthair breithe agam Gaelgeoir nuair bhí sí óg i nGaillimhe. Bhí sí imithe as a cuimhne nuair ag imirce a dhéanamh siad go dtí Beal Feirste.

D'fhoglaim mé i ndiadh ag foghlaim Gaeilge ar feadh fadó faoi mo clann atá go raibh grá ar an teanga beo acusan. Tá gaoltaí gairid agam leis gníonhréimeannái leis an bpolaitiocht nó méanáin acusan. Thosaigh siadsan féin as Gaeilge! Tuigim an cumhacht leis líne ghinealaigh go athaimsiú seo agamsa féin.

Searching for treasure in Irish.

Pól Ó Muiri discusses about the "metaphysical" joys of learning Irish. I agree with this writer. I read his very long review of a book, "A New View of the Irish Language," by way of Gaelport.com yesterday.

He also tells of material more difficult, however. He himself admits: "There are few learners of Irish - and I include myself - who do not, every once and while, wonder just how firm a grip they have on the language they use." Ó Muiri tells us that he is a learner also!

I put up my entry on this blog about the review last night. I've been thinking today about it all. It's difficult not to deny that working with Irish for somebody when abroad is easy.

Why? Well, I cannot see various signs around me when driving. I don't hear different programs on the radio every day. I do not find bilingual films on the television each night. It's the truth about service in Irish lately on the Internet. I'm able to catch a few of them there.

All the same, it's a big challenge. I wonder about my reward. Perhaps, it may be a reversible reaction. I revive a family custom. My birth-mother was a Gaelic-speaker when she was young in Galway. She forgot it when they moved to Belfast.

I learned after learning Irish for a long time about my family who had a love for the living language themselves. I have near relatives who had their careers in politics or media. They started themselves in Irish! I understand the power of this rediscovered family line.

Griangraf/Photo: "The Adult Learner" novel in Irish by Alan Desmond, for the same [audience]!/ "An Foghlaimeoir Fásta" úrscéal as Gaeilge le Alan Desmond acusan féin!

Pól Ó Muiri on Gaeilge's Future.

I excerpt freely from this excellent review by Ó Muiri from the Dublin Review of Books. There's much nuance; I could not cut as sharply as I'd intended. Those who may find this critique worthwhile, then, may forgive my lengthy borrowing. At least I formatted it and added italics for readability for my non-Irish-speaking audience! The URL is at the end of the entry for the complete version; mine's courtesy of gaelport.com for 3ú Samhain 2008.
Look West

A New View of the Irish Language, Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín & Seán Ó Cearnaigh (eds), Cois Life, 271 pp, E20, ISBN: 978 -1901176827.

Sa bhliain 1800, bhí cónaí ar mhilliún duine laistiar de líne ó Dhoire go Corcaigh arbh í an Ghaeilge a ngnáth-theanga labhartha. Faoi 1891, áfach, ní raibh fágtha ach 700,000 cainteoir Gaeilge sa tír, a raibh cónaí ar a leath acu i gceantair arbh í an Ghaeilge gnáth-theanga chumarsáide an phobail (ceantair ar a dtabharfaí 'an Ghaeltacht' in am trátha). Léirigh Daonáireamh 1891 go raibh 14 faoin gcéad den phobal dátheangach, gur Béarla amháin a bhí ag 85 faoin gcéad agus nach raibh ach 1 faoin gcéad ina gcainteoirí aonteangacha Gaeilge.

[In 1800 a million people lived behind a line from Derry to Cork whose usual language of speech was Irish. By 1891, however, there were only 700,000 Irish speakers in the country, half of whom lived in areas where Irish was the community’s language of communication (areas that would in time be called 'the Gaeltacht'). The Census of 1891 showed that 14% of the population was bilingual, that 85% spoke only English and that only 1% were monoglot Irish speakers.]

John Walsh, from An teanga, an cultúr agus an fhorbairt: cás na Gaeilge agus cás na hÉireann (Coiscéim, Dublin, 2004).

Irish is not doing badly in the world at large if we take the 2006 census figure of 1.6 million. By this yardstick, Irish would count as one of the 347 languages accounting for 94 per cent of the world’s population. In the European context only Maltese (371,900) and Estonian (1.08 million) are smaller than Irish, but Europe is perhaps unique in having within its borders such a large concentration of world languages (5 in the top ten) but only about 3 per cent of the world’s languages. Only about 5 per cent of the world’s languages have at least one million native speakers.

Nevertheless, to think of Irish as belonging to the big league of world languages with at least a million speakers makes it sound rather safer than would a comparison based on figures assessing the size of actual Irish-speaking communities. If we take the 2006 Census figure of 53,471 (3.2 per cent of the population) as the number of persons over 3 who use Irish daily outside education, or the figure of 17,687 (27.5 per cent) of the Gaeltacht population over 3 years of age who use Irish daily outside education, then we should direct our gaze towards languages of similar size (c. 8,000 to 54,000) and status. By this reckoning Irish belongs in a mid-sized group comprising about 25 per cent of the world’s languages with 10,000 to 99,000 speakers.

Suzanne Romaine, 'Irish in a Global Context', from A New View of the Irish Language.

The figures are startling, and perhaps confusing too. If there were a million native speakers of Irish in 1800 and 1.6 million speakers of Irish (native and learners) in 2006, then the case of Irish is not so bad as some would make out. Irish is not a world language - few Irish speakers make that claim - but it is a language of the world and belonging to the same category as 25 per cent of other world languages is no mean thing. Further, perhaps 'compulsory' Irish was not as bad as system as was thought. The numbers of native speakers living in Ireland is tiny in comparison with the figure for 1800 but the numbers who have learnt the language is impressive. (That they don't all get the opportunity to speak the language on a daily basis is an issue that will be addressed later.)

Looking back is the Irish speaker's curse. There is always something to be commemorated or remembered. If it is not the Battle of Kinsale, it is the Flight of the Earls, or Louvain, or the Famine, or Douglas Hyde, or the Gaeltacht as it was twenty years ago. (It was better then.) Even the most optimistic Irish speaker looks back - and not necessarily in the wee small hours when the drink is in and the sense is out. Looking forward is, of course, not unknown. There are some very forward-looking language pioneers who have achieved much in recent times. However, on the whole, looking forward goes against the Gaeilgeoir grain; looking forward is like a summer fad ' soon forgotten ' and quickly replaced by the dark impulse of retrospective introspection.

It is no surprise that looking back continues to hold such a firm grip on the mind. One could argue that those who fail to learn the language lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. Then again one could argue that the language sector has been holding the same internal conversation for the last thirty years or so. It is somewhat ironic that the publishers of this collection of essays, A New View of the Irish Language, should take their template from a book that was published in 1969, A View of the Irish Language, edited by Brian Ó Cuív. The editors of the current collection, Seán Ó Cearnaigh and Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín, write that:

The future of Irish is uncertain. It requires us to look in many directions, at once, but never backwards or inwards. Raising the ghetto walls, in the Gaeltacht or elsewhere, is no solution. The new compass must include points both real and virtual, from geographical communities to cyber-based networks, from the Aran Islands classroom to the google-user of focal.ie inside the Arctic Circle. Looking 'west', however, must remain a source of inspiration and linguistic renewal for speakers of Irish looking in, while preserving and developing a living west is an urgent necessity for maintaining Irish-speaking communities in the heartland.

There is certainly truth in that statement. However, the reader is immediately struck by a paradox: there is an honest attempt to honour past work and yet, that act of honouring, is, contrary to the editors' desire, a look 'backwards'. Ireland has undoubtedly changed since 1969 - though those changes are not immediately noticeable in the editors' selection of essay. The essays concern themselves with Ireland, for which you can read the Republic. Ó Cuív's collection appeared at a time when Stormont still stood and when Northern Ireland was the alternative linguistic model for Irish on the island - a place where the language was effectively the preserve of the Catholic community and education sector and enjoyed no official status. The editors do mention, in passing, that: 'Looking north, the language must develop across the political spectrum, and this vitality sustained (sic) in future decades against the threat of waning enthusiasm.' There is absolutely nothing wrong with the sentiment expressed in that sentence. However, there is no attempt to put meat on those bones.

That the language faces huge problems is undoubtedly true and the editors’ assertion that the contributors 'tell the story as it is, a glass both half-empty and half-full' is an honest one. Nonetheless, the number of contributors has the unwanted result of making the story of Irish seem more complicated than it need be. Given too that the editors have aimed the publication at 'a broad public', fewer contributors writing more essays might have helped give the material a more sustained conversational tone. To my mind, there seem to be four main questions that a book like this should answer. First there is the philosophical one: why Irish? Why bother learning the language at all; what 'good' does it serve? Second there is the question of 'how' Irish? How does the language sector work? How is the language funded? Who gets the money? How do they spend it? Third there is the issue of the Gaeltacht. What is its role and its future? Finally, there is the question of 'why' and 'how' together. What results are there from the money spent on the desire to learn?

There is nothing very original about any of these questions and they are addressed on a regular basis in Irish language circles. Indeed, the 'Why Irish?' question was the title of a discussion document produced by the now defunct Bord na Gaeilge in 1989, Why Irish? Language and Identity in Ireland Today. The authors wrote:

More importantly, we would argue that it is far too premature to consign the Irish language to oblivion. The trends which have encouraged its marginalisation in recent years are not irreversible. Indeed, a number of movements already exist in Irish society which could, if they were pulled together, start to reverse these trends: the naíonra or pre-school movement, the all-Irish schools and the success of summer colleges; the growth of a commitment to Irish within some professional societies; developments in art, music, literature and dance; environmental and community movements which are integrating the language into their goals. The linguistic situation is there to be created, if we can convince ourselves that its creation is worthwhile.

Almost twenty years later, the 'linguistic situation' is still being created. The educational movements to which the authors referred are still there. Even better, there is a bilingual television service, TG4, an Official Languages Act, and Irish is an official and working language of the European Union. Despite that, the need to convince is as great as ever.

Many Gaeltacht areas are in decline, that is to say the numbers of Irish speakers using the language is dropping and the quality of the Irish they speak is evolving or fraying (depending on whether you look forward or back) into something other than it is now or was in recent times. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the State who know Irish but don't have the opportunity to speak it. That those people continue to mark their support for the language in the census, for example, is no small act of fidelity. Then again there are hundreds of thousands of people who despite their schooling in the State have nothing to do with the language and bear it ill will, if letters to the editor or newspaper opinion pieces are any accurate indication of the public mood. (And they are not always, it must be said.) Still, those who do rouse themselves to fury and disdain the language usually insist that it is of no relevance to them and write that they resent its very existence.

Yet the paradox for the Irish language is that this could be termed its Golden Age. Never have language organisations had so much money; never has the language enjoyed such legislative protection or indeed such powerful political patronage. It is only a matter of months since an Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil, Brian Cowen, and the leader of Fine Gael, Enda Kenny, spoke politics ' actually spoke as opposed to reading a pre-prepared statement ' in Irish with each other in the Dáil. There are Irish language entrepreneurs, Internet magazines, old-fashioned printed news publications and magazines, so much prose and poetry that you could not shake a stick at it, there is a television station, a national radio station and a couple of local ones, a professional caste of journalists and university lecturers that would warm the cockles of Aodh Mac Aingil’s croí, there is a Gaeltacht development authority and a cross-Border body and cultural centres and then there’s the money. Did I mention the money? Bags and bags of money. It's not so much
béal bocht as big bucks.

Time then for a new appraisal of the Irish language. High time, and the fact that A New View of the Irish Language is in English but addresses the Irish-language issue is welcome. There is a certainly a domestic and international audience for this material and the broad range of topics touched on - poetry and prose, issues on legislation, scholarship, teaching and learning and the media, for example - offers a useful primer. For someone with no or little knowledge of the language, it would be a fine enough start. However, the difficulty with individual essays is that the tone is not the same throughout and what is offered ' individual experts with opinions ' does not necessarily end up giving an insightful overview of the subject. As one contributor notes, the essay form has its limitations. Perhaps it is inevitable that not every essay carries the reader’s attention. After all, the essay ' like the interview ' is essentially a conversation between writer and reader and if you meet twenty people in one go the chances are that you will not be riveted by everything they have to say.

Iarfhlaith Watson's essay, 'The Irish Language and Identity', is the closest thing in the book to a focus on the 'why' question. He writes:

The Irish language continues to be regarded as an important aspect of Irish national identity. To the majority of people in Ireland the Irish language is primarily of symbolic importance ' It seems that the majority of people in Ireland believe that promoting the Irish language is important to the country and to them personally, but a lower percentage believe that actually speaking Irish is important to being Irish. Overall, the majority of Irish people appear to regard the Irish language to be of symbolic importance for Irish national identity and a very large minority regard the actual speaking of Irish as important.

He goes on to argue that:

Efforts to revive the Irish language reflect wider ideological processes. Although there have been ideological shifts, and identity has changed (because it is always under construction), national identity has remained at the heart of justifications for reviving the Irish language. People learn Irish and support its promotion because of this sense of identity. Moreover, the Irish language is supported by the state to a degree to which other minority languages are not. In general the public supports (or at least tolerates) this level of commitment because of the perceived connection between the Irish language and Irishness. Identification with the nation, although not as 'hot' as it once was in Ireland, remains. The Irish language remains related to that identification.

Watson's suggestion that Irish is being 'revived' is problematic. The language has never been dead and the preferred term for many in the language sector is 'maintenance', a process of underpinning what already exists and encouraging new initiatives. Of course, it could be added that the reason the majority does not actually believe that speaking Irish is important is because they simply do not get the opportunity and that the state support which Watson mentions for Irish as a 'minority language' is actually support for what the Constitution terms 'the first official language'.

Perhaps the reason why Irish and national identity seem so hard to define is because there are, in essence, two views of the Irish language in competition. Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse had visions for the language that were, in some regard, complementary and in other ways totally different. Those opposing elements have never been entirely reconciled. For Hyde, the language project was an intellectual one which aimed to maintain a native and distinctive part of Irish culture against a world language. Pearse did not entirely disagree with that but his project was also a revolutionary one; he wanted to reinstate Irish as the language of a Republic. Not surprisingly, both views are accommodated in the history of the language’s development in Ireland (by which I mean the entire thirty-two counties).

One of the difficulties that the contemporary language movement has had in persuading people to use the language is that the middle class ' a vague term, I accept ' are for the most part not taken with either intellectual or revolutionary projects. Language organisations that pitch the language to this audience as part of Ireland’s valuable cultural heritage are on a hiding to nothing. They cannot convince enough of this bloated, self-satisfied class (who hardly know holiday French or Spanish) that the rich, metaphysical rewards of speaking Irish are worth the effort. The little Englander attitude towards languages ' that they are all redundant in the face of English spoken loudly ' 'Another coffee, per favor!' ' is all too common. There is little mileage to be gained from extolling the beauty of language as language when the ultimate badge of identity is the physical commodity ' the car, the second home, the designer clothes.

Similarly, political parties who attempt - and not always with any great conviction - to tick the language box in their electoral strategies are wary of waving the flag too much in case it frightens off certain voters. The idea of preserving Irish as a revolutionary undertaking is not one that goes down well with many affluent voters or indeed some affluent commentators. Only the Provos have tried to push language as revolution. They have been rebuffed in the Republic (and not just on language grounds obviously) and they have probably done more harm than good in Northern Ireland, where they have poisoned the ground water with their rhetoric - and also with the blood of many dead.

So 'why Irish?' remains the question that cannot be answered - or at least not answered to the satisfaction of enough people often enough. Then again, perhaps the language lobby has lost the run of itself in its attempts to justify Irish. Perhaps the failure to place ' and keep ' the Gaeltacht at the centre of national cultural is finally bearing its own poisonous fruit. Perhaps the easiest way of answering the 'why Irish?' question is to point to the Gaeltacht and its distinctive and unique culture - which amazingly still survives, fractured but functional.

The relationship between Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht areas has shifted. Slowly but surely the importance of the Gaeltacht has been downplayed - even by some Irish speakers. The Gaeltacht has become simply another component of the language sector. The Irish that people learn in, say, Belfast is seen to be as legitimate as the Irish of Gaoth Dobhair, so much so in fact that some would argue ' and I have heard it ' that there is no need to leave West Belfast to learn Irish. That disregard for the Gaeltacht is shocking; it is a stupidity that is hard to credit, but one that exists and one that is not so difficult to understand. It is language as symbol rather than language as medium, that is to say you learn enough Irish to navigate the political issues of the day but never learn enough to realise just how little you know. That, of course, is frightening. There are few learners of Irish - and I include myself - who do not, every once and while, wonder just how firm a grip they have on the language they use. Only the vain and the ignorant have the luxury of ignoring that question.

The language question has become so difficult because it has become so confused and it has become confused because there seem to be so many questions. Perhaps 'why Irish?' can be best and most comprehensively answered with the simple answer 'Because there is a Gaeltacht.' Why provide services in Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. Why educate through Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. Why write in Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. (This is not to say that the Irish speaker who lives in the east or midlands of Ireland is less an Irish speaker than the one raised in the Gaeltacht.) But beside the Gaeltacht all else is secondary - not worthless, mind, not without merit, not unimportant - simply secondary. It is the Gaeltacht, above all else, that gives the language its authority as a national undertaking and the destruction of that Gaeltacht will herald the final and ultimate destruction of that authority. (Should the reviewer draw any conclusion from the fact that the essay on the Gaeltacht is ninth in this collection? It seems strange that a book aimed at the general public would have this topic so far back. After all, many people’s experience of real spoken Irish ' perhaps their only one ' is a youthful stay at a Gaeltacht summer college.)

As already noted, Ó Cearnaigh and Nic Pháidín have written that the Gaeltacht remains an 'inspiration' and that 'preserving and developing a living west is an urgent necessity for maintaining Irish-speaking communities in the heartland'. But if that inspiration is the only option what happens if the Gaeltacht dies? Seosamh Mac Donncha and Conchúr Ó Giollagáin write in 'The Gaeltacht Today' that:

Recent research serves to highlight what is readily evident to Gaeltacht inhabitants: the Gaeltacht as a linguistic entity is in crisis and struggling with the pressures of an advanced stage of language shift. The approach date has served to implicate our communal and educational institutions in this process of language shift rather providing proactive support to resist the pressures of this sociolinguistic endgame. As the use of English becomes more embedded in the social networks of the young, the clear challenge of educational and communal institutions in the Gaeltacht is to empower young speakers of Irish to counteract the pressures of the majority language in a manner that fosters the socialization of Irish in the social networks of the young living in the Gaeltacht. The obvious outcome of an inadequate response to this stark challenge is the completion of the language shift from Irish to English in the remaining Gaeltacht districts where the use of Irish still predominates as the communal language.

That question of language shift from Irish to English would seem to be the most important one at the moment. It could be argued that as the language sector has developed it has become so complicated that it has forgotten its own Gaeltacht roots. This is not an argument to abandon all Irish-language activity in non-Gaeltacht areas. That would simply be silly. Not every Irish speaker (this writer included) wants to live in the Gaeltacht. There has to be a balance in catering for Irish speakers outside the Gaeltacht and native speakers within it. But it would seem to me that the balance has shifted too much, with many regarding the Gaeltacht as just another part of the equation. If we argue, however, that it is the Gaeltacht that gives the entire language movement its moral right to promote the language on a national scale then if that Gaeltacht disappears, are not Irish speakers - despite their funding, their numbers and their legal protections - little more than the enthusiasts for Manx or Cornish, people who seek to revive a language that has no native speakers?

One wonders indeed if non-native speakers of Irish appreciate often enough just what a wonderful phenomenon the native speaker is? Is there a sufficient understanding that even the most parlous, holed, fractured breac-Ghaeltacht contains more native Irish than a dozen night classes for learners. This is not to deride the learners and it is not to talk up areas many of which may be fatally wounded. It is a simple expression of wonder that so many areas have managed to keep the linguistic faith, that despite emigration, unemployment, holiday homes and an indifferent officialdom there are still people who have clung to the language and who, given the right encouragement and support, might yet pass it on to another generation. Should it not be a matter of national pride that they have held on to so much despite the challenges they faced. Let me put it another way: were these people, say, cheese-makers rather than Irish speakers, would we not enthuse about their fidelity to old ways and marvel at the knowledge they had kept alive in spite of dungeon, famine and sword?

The reasons for the marginalisation of the Gaeltacht in the story of Irish vary from place to place. In the North, they often have their roots in politics, where many urban Irish speakers simply do not feel the need to go the Gaeltacht. There can be an aggressive chauvinism within cities towards the country at the best of times. It is not surprising that that might also find expression in language circles and that chauvinism can also be exaggerated by local politics. Tight-knit city communities can offer the fluent Irish speaker a small pond in which to swim. That the Irish they speak and the topics they address in that Irish will not necessarily chime with the syntax and subject of Gaeltacht Irish does not bother them: city Irish is as good as country Irish, they argue, though in fact, the city dialect is often a poorer version of the country one, with all the implications that has for the quality of speech.

[Discussion of the Údarás na Gaeltachta, Foras na Gaeilge, post-GFA party shuffling in the North, difficulties of a national organization for a disparate localized identity throughout much of the island, and the uneasiness in academia regarding lecturing "as Gaeilge" follow.]

That is one reason why a concluding chapter would have been welcome. Another would be to provide a manifesto for the weary reader. With the best will in the world, reading twenty essays will leave even the most committed general reader tired. That there is much of interest in many of the essays is a given. However, there is no headline, no one moment to focus the reader and say: 'Look, this is what we believe. This is our clarion call.' The book would have benefited from a reflection on what its contributors have said, not as a corrective to them but simply to bring their various thoughts and arguments together and to offer the reader a coherent overview.

With that in mind, I will leave the last word and the focal scoir to Suzanne Romaine, whose contribution introduced this review:

While it is critically important to confront openly and realistically the actual extent of the Irish-speaking communities at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Irish would certainly be a lot worse off without all the work on its behalf. Most threatened languages will not achieve anything like the relative success of Irish. A sign that once hung in Albert Einstein's office declared that 'not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted'. The active Irish-language scene probably comprises only 5 to 10 per cent of the island's population, and around one in three people (c 1.8 million) on the island can understand Irish to some extent. This means that the world in Irish will not be lost and the world can indeed still be lived in Irish by those who choose to learn it and use it. That is hardly failure.

Dublin Review of Books - Pól Ó Muiri review

Photo: Zazzle.com. They also sell "Sarah Palin in 2012," but their Election Day Special expires tomorrow, for some reason.

Insults in Irish!

From the Irish News, via, it figures, the Ulster-Irish on-line dictionary, for your delectation, use, and abuse. Why do Northerners seem to excel at these verbal jousts? Ar bhfuil sínteleach mé?
Slamfhocail gives a new meaning to the poetry slams beloved of coffeehouse denizens.

15ú Meán Fómhair 2008 (thanks to Gaelport.com)

The quintessentially native Irish art of calling people names

As regular readers of the Bluffer's Guide to Irish will know, the Bluffer is a mild-mannered individual, spreading sweetness and light wherever he goes.

However, he is a little prone to the odd bout of dí-mhúineadh - bad manners, droch-spin - bad mood or even buile bhóthair - road rage.

Luckily, the victims of the Bluffer's bad humour have no idea what he's saying as he is blessed with a vocabulary of invective in his native language that would be hard to better.

Irish maslaí - insults and mallachtaí - curses are much superior to those of Anglo-Saxon stock which all begin with the letter f, but we Gaels can insult people using the whole alphabet!

Unfortunately, there isn't enough space in this article for the whole alphabet, but here's a taster.

Breast thú has nothing to do with the female anatomy, but is a contraction of beir as tu meaning clear off or words to that effect.

Most people know amadán is a fool, but we have many more word for fool and I'm indebted to Ciarán Mac Murchaidh's Focail na nUltach which can be downloaded from the internet for many of these. Many are words that have passed from every day speech, but the Bluffer will do his bit to see them return to popularity.

For instance, bimealóir is a lovely Donegal word for a fool.

Dobhrán is stupid person and the adjective is dobhránta.

Dundarlán is another word for a dunce but it also means a small man. (Irish can be size-ist just like any other language!)

So if a small, stupid man moves into your lane without indicating, you can call him a dundarlán!

Irish speakers don't like people who talk too much and there is a pile of words to do with the loquacious.

Glagaire is a foolish talker and I like the word meigeadán for a talkative person because it comes from meigeadach which means the bleating of a goat!

Duine scártha is someone with a 'bad tongue' one given to slamfhocail - lewd or obscene words.

Ráscán is someone who speaks without thinking so duine ráscánta is someone who yaks on without thinking about the feelings of others.

Laziness is another characteristic that the Irish don't like. An Irish-speaking couch potato is an oxymoron.

However you can add tall and lanky and lazy together to get, em, a síntealach, a tall, lanky, lazy person of either gender while stollaire is a lazy man.

Ciafartán is another word I like. It means 'one who is bedraggled, wet and untidy, unkempt.'

Ciafartáin are a dying breed because we all go about in cars or taxis nowadays and men are allowed to carry umbrellas without their manhood being called into question so becoming bedraggled, wet and untidy is a rare occurance.

The Irish have long been praised for the sheer poetry of their oaths, curses and maledictions.

More - and worse - next week.

Cúpla focal

dí-mhúineadh (jee-woonoo) - bad manners

droch-spin (drokh-spin)- bad mood

buile bhóthair (bwilye woher) - road rage

maslaí (maaslee) - insults

mallachtaí (maalakhtee) - curses

breast thú! (brest hoo) - clear off!

amadán (amadaan) - a fool

bimealóir (bimalore) - a fool

dobhrán (roe-raan) - stupid person

dundarlán (dunderlaan) - a dunce

glagaire (glagera) - a foolish talker

meigeadán (megadaan) - a talkative person

duine scártha (dinya scaarha) - a foul-mouthed person

slamfhocail (slaamuckle) - lewd or obscene words

ráscán (rascaan) - someone who speaks without thinking

síntealach (sheenchilakh) -a tall, lanky, lazy person

stollaire (stawlera) - a lazy man

ciafartán (keefertaan) - a bedraggled, wet and untidy person

www.irishnews.com

Irish News - Lthch:

Robert McMillen

Not Nice to fool Mother Nature

As Imperial Margarine used to warn me as a kid with its ubiquitous commercial. The crown Mother wore was about as big as that by Elizabeth Windsor. I wondered if it was made of plastic and wire, and how it perched on top of the matronly coiffure.

"Lorax" débuts with this blog watch about: "Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center". Vote now about whether "extreme sports" should take the place of solitude. As "Lorax" observes, since the camp was founded in 1906, it did preserve much of what now would look as inviting as soulless suburban Scotts Valley adjacent, given our rapacity. Yet, now the stewards of this redwood forest where Bean Creek flows down from the mountain summits overlooking San José into Zayante Creek and then forms the river that flows into Santa Cruz immorally-- and perhaps illegally-- insist on building enormous platforms upon which screaming teens and sobbing parents can whoosh on ropes. This enriches the coffers of this sprawling conference center. It perhaps-- same argument as those in our government who "utilize" state and national forests-- trades a few sylvan trunks for the long-term financial solvency of the greater spread.

Yet, as Christians, they need not act like former Secretary of the Interior Watt, with his assumptions to rape Gaia (a pagan term he'd never countenance) since the Messiah's on his way. Or the millenialist rule, Great Dispensation and/or rapture, depending on your sect. "Lorax" knows whom to ask about these denominational doctrines. And, even Jim Willis, Sojourners, and so I've heard maybe a few of the anti-war, peace tradition, non-violent advocates whose members pray-to-play at Mount Hermon might well weigh in about rendering unto Nature's Theme Park. Talk about a "burned-over district" in the Great Awakening. Borrow Peter to pay Paul.

I encourage you to cast your vote against the desecration at a place that I and my family love. We frequently stay near the Conference Center. We heard the saws and shouts constantly on our last trip. They shattered much of the silence. This will only intensify once the young campers scamper and scurry through, and above, the woods. The trails wind under sensitive terrain. Fires threaten. Floods lurk. This watershed cannot handle thousands of treads. This change dismayed us. While we sneak about the Mount's fringes-- if not beyond the amplified guitar hymns, than far beyond the closed circle of the paid-up name-tagged elect-- we do admire the original idealism of its founders.

On my last morning recently, across from the Center's domain, I listened to the crews as they sawed and yelled and banged. Sitting there, I discovered in Margaret Koch's 1973 well-written local chronicle, "Parade of the Past: Santa Cruz County," about Zayante. Billy Wade, an Irish immigrant, married Twyeenya, last of the riparian maidens, and they dwelt down by the creek. When the Mount's early establishers investigated the area, they heard about where the couple had lived from an old pioneer. Nothing of their cabin remains. Nearby, "Mountain Charley" McKiernan arriving in the 1840s fought and drank and lived up to the Hibernian stereotype as he worked at the mill built where the two creeks meet. I wondered about how far the Irish settlers had travelled to come to a place still under the rule of a newly independent Mexico, meeting and mating with members of a tribe with an hispanized name, "Zayante," we don't know the real meaning of.

In a place so full of mystery, we need to respect what another native people, from Hawai'i, would call "mana," the spirit of the place. Gaspar de Portola's expedition marvelled when they found the arching groves. Billy Wade's ancestors knew the mystery that comes with the numinous as much as his wife's people. Yet, we often only have the names. They last, if a river like "Zayante," longest to mark the divides of water or rock that precede endless waves of immigrants or invaders. Irish forests, anti-British tellers claim, fell to construct ships that spanned the empire. I recall biblical stories about Lebanon's deforestation. Like the namesake Mount Hermon, its cedars may have long been cut. Native peoples no longer Phoenician or Philistine. All we have: a few verses, an attenuated tradition from dead or struggling languages. When we destroy the golden bough or the green branch, we hasten our own spiritual, cultural, natural deaths.

I've written earlier this week about Tara and "dindshenchas," or topynomic place-name lore still potent to those who seek it in a likewise dwindling rural Irish landscape. That site's under the bulldozers that push a motorway. More commuters, more holiday makers, more tree-climbers. I've also published an article on how learners of Irish connect the threatened yet resilient voices within the land to their wisdom: "Making the Case for Irish Through English: Eco-Critical Language Politics." It's more fun than it sounds. I analyze nipples.

Can't romanticize the Celts! Consider eager emigré Mountain Charley. He's famed for killing one of our state's totems decades after he would have seen the Bear Flag fly over a brief Republic. Meta-symbolism apparent without post-colonial frame here.

But we, a century after the Mount's founders planted and encouraged redwoods to grow after Henry Cowell and so many loggers Irish and otherwise there hacked and burned these slopes, cannot leave them be as awesome (dude!) companions. While Druids venerated trees, and the Celts derived the very way they counted time and kept records from names related to what grew tall around them, we Americans, Christians or otherwise, appear to dominate all things that bear fruit and multiply, as we engender more appetites for assaultive adventure than a fragile earth can sustain.

Caption to photo: Black-and-white portrait of Charles Henry "Mountain Charley" McKiernan. McKiernan was one of the first white settlers in the Santa Cruz mountains, and was noted for having survived an attack by a grizzly bear. photo by A. P. Hill of A.P. Hill - original painting at Los Gatos Museum.