Amú in Aistriúchán/Lost in Translation

This could be termed a bad blog, bad in the sense that I am simply reprinting an address I gave to the 21st annual Douglas Hyde Conference in Co Roscommon over a week ago on the theme Amú in Aistriúchán/Lost in Translation. Hopefully, you will find something of merit in it and I hope it adds something useful to the on-going debate on the language.

Amú in Aistriúchán

I have taken a very liberal view of my brief for this presentation. Indeed, some might go so far as to suggest that I have ignored it but I hope I not. What I would like to do is offer something a little more anecdotal on this theme – the perspective of a journalist and writer who has been amú in aistriúchán for many years and, God willing, will continue to be amú in aistriúchán for many more.

I am also delighted to be invited to events like this – though always a little nervous too. I am the archetypical hack in that I will give you 200 words on anything you want, in Irish or English. I will write the right amount of words and deliver them for the dead-line, move on and start again. I write in Irish for the Irish Times on matters pertaining to the language; I write a sports column for the Irish-language weekly, Foinse, called Saighdiúir Samhraidh, and I have just started a monthly column with the Internet magazine, Beo!, which deals with the lighter side of being a parent. In English, I write a column for the Belfast Telegraph on culture – in its broadest definition – and touch on politics. That is a very rough summing-up of my journalistic career so far.

The name on the columns is, of course, Pól Ó Muirí. However, there is an element of amú in aistriúchán there. My contemporaries from school and my child-hood neighbours from Belfast would have known me only as Paul Murray. The translation to Ó Muirí is as every bit as exotic to them as if I had changed my name to Marilyn Monroe. So there is Pól Ó Muirí the journalist and Paul Murray, his shadow. I have to say too that Paul Murray is alive and well. He is to be seen on Ulster’s handball courts where he has been playing handball for over 27 years and has managed, in all that time, to win next to nothing. Pól Ó Muirí may have landed himself a job with the Irish Times but the only way Paul Murray will ever win a national handball title is if he is drawn against Pól Ó Muirí in the final – and even then I would not put money on him winning.

I am not that old – only 42 – but old enough to remember a time in West Belfast when the number of Irish speakers could have all fitted into one small hall. The numbers of people speaking Irish since my youth has certainly grown but the language is still something that many people – both nationalist and unionist – don’t come in touch with.

In this context, I should mention that the Belfast Telegraph – or the Tele – is considered a unionist newspaper and I think I am right in saying that I am the first Irish speaker to have his own column – replete with síniú fada – in it. Not that I spend every week writing about the Irish language. I don’t. Even though the column is in English , there is an element of translation involved in writing about matters pertaining to Irish. I usually write about 1,100 words on six or seven issues. That usually means that if I am writing about the Irish language that I need to introduce the topic in question, give some sort of background information and then make my point as succinctly as I can.

Not surprisingly, there are many people of a unionist background who do not know anything about the Irish language – or if they do know something it may be a negative connotation, one associated with Sinn Féin or the Provisional IRA. Something has certainly been lost in the translation of Hyde’s vision in the North. Language matters are certainly still contentious in the North. The cultural battle lines between the DUP and Sinn Féin are quite starkly drawn – though one need not accept those battle lines.

The difficulty for both parties is that they appeal to fundamentalist cultural positions. For Sinn Féin, the language issue still remains one of cultural counter symbol – it is not English; it is recognisably something that pertains to Ireland; it is native expression. That is not to say, that there are not Irish speakers in Sinn Féin who value the language as language. There are but their party has its own baggage.

I think the DUP accept Sinn Féin’s definition of Irish. They do see it as a threat to their understanding of what it means to be British. That there are people – even now from a unionist/Protestant background – who speak Irish is something that makes them feel uncomfortable.

As a counter-weight the DUP have had to invent Ulster-Scots, a fiction that they promote as being exclusive to their voters, ie, unionists. The difficulty is that Ulster-Scots or Scots in Ulster – I will leave the definition – is spoken by many in North Antrim who are of a nationalist and Catholic background. The fact that they would not regard themselves as British is simply ignored by the DUP. Ignored too is the fact that Robbie Burns, that great poet of Scots, was a firm favourite of the Catholic Irish-speaking navvies and agricultural workers who crossed over from Donegal (and Mayo too) to take seasonal work in Scotland.

Indeed, Séamus Ó Grianna, author of Nuair a bhí mé óg and Saol Corrach, quotes Burns in his writings. To add to the irony, Ó Grianna took part in the War of Independence and sided with the anti-Treaty forces in the Civil War. I don’t imagine the DUP, however, will be celebrating his contribution to Ulster-Scots culture any time soon.

Things become even more complicated for both parties when we consider that Scots Gaelic and Welsh are both spoken in Britain and the promotion of those languages challenge the very narrow definition of what languages are and who uses them. It has certainly been an education watching the DUP oppose the promotion of Irish on the grounds that it is nothing to do with them while watching Irish speakers counter with the claim that in Britain Scots Gaelic and Welsh both enjoy measures of legislative protection.

Of course, the irony is that some of the more green-tinted Gaeilgeoirí can’t bear to use the name “Northern Ireland” and prefer to refer to the place as “the Six Counties”. Needless to say, it is not edifying but it may point to the fact that people in the North are tripping towards some understanding of Irish in the context of these islands. One often hears of areas of my home city, Belfast, as being ‘interfaces’. In truth, I think the North is one large interface – an area that has historical links with Scotland in particular due to Plantation and also more peaceful and more ancient social interaction between Irish speakers on either side of the Sea of Moyle.

Further, the North is an area where Irish is still very much lost in translation – translation into English – and it provides an alternative linguistic model to that in this State. People may and do give off here about what is termed ‘compulsory’ Irish but how much poorer we would all be if the founders of this State had turned a deaf ear to Hyde and his contemporaries and had continued a policy of compulsory English?

Of course, it is not difficult to envisage such a scheme. Simply go to the Border and watch as the bilingual place-names are replaced by ones in English only. We may all develop a certain language blindness to road signs in Irish and English but it is certainly even odder to find yourself crossing an Irish border and finding signs in English only.

I should mention too that that is not the case in Britain. I was recently in Cardiff and was astounded by how comprehensively the country was blanketed in Welsh/English road signs nor was it simply road signs or official areas that boasted bilingual signage. Street names in Cardiff were in both languages, commercial shops had bilingual signs and I even noticed that Tescos was bilingual.

Whether or not the North gets an Irish-language Act remains to be seen and what effect any act may have on the perception of Irish is also open to debate. Certainly, the status quo is not an option for Irish speakers in the North. Lesser-used languages need visibility in order to remain people that they are there. That is not to say that there have not been attempts by Sinn Féin, for example, to put the language in a public context.

The former SF health minister, Bairbre de Brún, put job adverts in the paper in Irish and it is not uncommon to see announcements on road closures or developments in Irish in the local press. What effect, if any, this has in raising the language’s profile or promoting its use is very debatable. At best, it is a very wooden way of signalling to unionists that the North’s English-only policy is not acceptable and, at worse, it is simply tokenism. And we all know by now that the language does not need tokenism. Are such adverts an example of amú in aistriúchán? They render English into Irish and provide some employment for some one. In the context of the North that is something, not much perhaps, but something.

However, the challenge for Irish speakers will always be to move beyond signage. The question is which is more preferable: bilingual road signs or attracting more Irish speakers from a unionist background to use the language? In an ideal world, you would want both. In an ideal world, a unionist or nationalist using Irish should be no cause for comment but we do not live in an ideal world.

Nor would I over emphasise the nationalist attachment to Irish. That there are many more people who speak Irish now than when I was younger is certainly true. It really is quite startling to see the number of young people who have an attachment to Irish and who have managed, or who are attempting, to carve out a little niche for themselves in the language.

30 odd years ago, at the age of 11, I was given my first formal Irish classes at a Christian Brothers’ Grammar School. I had gone through a Catholic primary system that did not teach Irish in any shape or form. 30 odd years ago I was confronted for the first time with translation from Irish to English and back with First Steps in Irish. What is the Irish for spoon? Where is the spoon? Is the spoon dirty?

Simple sentences that, at the time, were far beyond my ken. I wish I could say that things have changed greatly in the interim. They haven’t really. Many people still learn the language as I learned it; many have no access to Irish at the primary level and must wait until they are 11 before they realise that the language exists – and even then they might attend a school where it is not taught at all. One could become pessimistic in the face of that.

I would hope that that will not always be the case. I would hope that those who speak, write, create in Irish will be recognised as making a genuine and fruitful contribution to culture – irrespective of whatever flag flies over Stormont and that we can replace amú with abú!