Language as heritage

We can cherish or abuse the manifestations of our heritage. One either regards the dolmens, standing stones, raths and castles that dot our landscape to be of value or one does not. For the most part, people like the physical aspects of our heritage – but it is a lazy kind of liking, the kind that demands no effort. They stand, therefore, they are. Occasionally, as in the case of Tara, we are forced to take sides, consider issues, decide what is truly valuable and what is nice but not necessary.

The Irish language probably falls into the latter category for many people – nice but not necessary. The language’s opponents are quick to point to it as being obsolete, useless. “We all speak English now,” is a common, ignorant refrain. Let us, therefore, be sensible. Let us not waste money that could be better spent. The old girl is on her last legs; let us help her on her way with a little (involuntary) linguistic euthanasia. Sure, it’s the decent thing to do. The arguments are as predictable and as reactionary as the idiots who make them.

Yet what they forget is that, unlike dolmens, Irish is a language, a medium of the living and breathing, a voice of long-established communities, of drunks and drop-outs, of professors and pimps, of somebodies and nobodies. Language is all about people and a language is only as good as the opportunities that people have to use it. That’s why making Irish an official and working language in the European Union was so important. You have got to work that language.

Language is not heritage like a tin whistle or bodhrán; it is not a traditional art or a craft. It is more than a tool; it is more than basket-weaving. Speaking Irish of itself is not an art. There are people with ‘good’ Irish – melodious, rich, grammatical – and people with ‘bad’ Irish. However, the people with the best Irish are the ones with something to say and that is the biggest difference between language as heritage and stones as heritage – the stones are going nowhere (unless we actually choose to crush them) but language is always going somewhere.

It seeps through people’s thoughts and those thoughts seep out into television or radio or in print. Sometimes they are banal but sometimes there is a spark of creativity and originality, something that is very particular and definite about us and how we think and see this planet. The great undertow of Irish tugs and pulls and shoves our perceptions; it is our North Star whether we look up or not.

Language is not like a session in the pub or an afternoon in Croke Park – though it can be as much fun when, suddenly, it all clicks and aspiration and eclipse and tenses knot together and move like Christy Ring. More often than not, however, it is akin to a life-time commitment to a diet, an intellectual diet.

In our hearts and in our heads, we know that cabbage and bacon is good food but we would much rather have a feed of cavier, say our monoglot English speakers. We are sophisticated, rich and successful. Peasant food is, after all, for peasants. We have made our peace with the fada-free English, they say. We are complete and would be happy – were it not for the few thousand, no, few hundred, no, few score, Irish-speaking bastards who continue to whine and gurn about the language.

These swine with their talk about maintaining Gaeltacht regions, building gaelscoileanna, giving children an education about their country’s history. Their vision of an other Ireland and our hidden history in song, manuscripts, folklore and literature is so annoying. (Admittedly, we are sometimes grateful, depending on the author. “Och, aye, him, I like him” – though there is always a “Och, her. Oh, I don’t like her at all.”)

Let us reduce Ireland then in this new, expansive, age. Let us reduce it to its barest shell. Imagine an Ireland without ‘compulsory’ Irish, without a Gaeltacht, without Brú na Bóinne and then knock down the Norman castles and flatten every Celtic cross, hole every currach and use the canvasses of Jack B. Yeats as toilet paper. Then burn the fiddles, puncture the bodhráns, smelt the tin whistles, ban sean-nós singing, céilí dancing and sets. Play the Munster hurling championship in Belfast – and let Antrim win.

And then lift them – Irish speakers – out of this country one by one. Remove them and everything, absolutely everything, they have ever said or made from our memories and enjoy the silence. That’s Ireland without Irish, an apocalyptic landscape, the Great Blasket writ large.

This is article was published previously and is slightly edited.