Irish abroad

It should not surprise me but it does – the fact that anyone outside Ireland learns, speaks or has an interest in the Irish language. TG4 began a new series tonight – Thar Sáile (Over Seas) – in which presenter Brigid Breathnach visited Prague in the Czech Republic. There she met with, amongst others, Síle Ní Bhroin, a young woman from Dublin who is teaching Irish at Charles University in the city. Ní Bhroin’s pupils who were interviewed had varying command of the language and seemed genuinely interested in Irish-language literature and traditional music.

Of course, I should not be surprised by this. Twenty plus years ago when I was at uni, there was always the odd continental type who studied the language. But they tended to be academics with an interest in Old Irish and who had just learned Modern Irish for fun. (As one does!) The students learning Irish from Ní Bhroin were not all academics although she did mention that there were linguists studying the language and they tended to ask the hardest questions.

It was nice too to hear a couple of the Irish people interviewed saying that Czech was a harder language to learn than Irish. That is a point that is well worth repeating. The grammar of Irish can be infuriating but the language is not as difficult as is often suggested. Irish has only a handful of irregular verbs, two conjugations and, it transpires, fewer declensions than Czech. Put that in your píopa and smoke it!

As a journalist, I have met people from Australia, Holland, Germany, the US and Canada who have learned Irish to varying degrees of fluency. Few of them were academics and they came from a very wide range of professions. Indeed, I recently received an email from a Polish teacher, written in good Irish, who is learning the language in Poland. In fact, she and her class mates are using a book for adult learners that I wrote. (I am big in Poland!)

It is certainly encouraging to know that there are people outside of Ireland with an interest in the language. Whether that interest will actually spur more Irish people to learn the language is, of course, another matter. I remember one (nationalist) adult learner in a class in west Belfast who gave up learning the language after a few months: “It is nice to have but you don’t need it.” The challenge for Irish-language organisations is to convince people that they do need Irish – and it is no easy task.

Thar Sáile will be back on TG4 next Sunday at 8pm. The programme is subtitled and well worth a look. As this is March, the month associated with Seachtain na Gaeilge, I will try and blog a few more random thoughts on the subject of Irish in the coming days and, if you are really unlucky, weeks.