DEAR ACID TONGUE
Stan Gebler Davies laments the
failure of his fellow Irishmen to speak their native language
Kinsale, Co. Cork THE Dutch speak Dutch and the Germans German. The Greeks speak Greek and the Danes speak Danish but the Irish cannot speak Irish. This peculiar disability has the consequence that the Republic of Ireland, alone of member states of the EEC, does not insist on adding to the Babel at Brussels its own national and 'first official lan- guage', as it is recognised in the Eire Constitution. This is for the reason that few of our legislators, like almost all those they represent, have command of more than a couple of hundred words of it, and the destruction wrought upon grammar and syntax by politicians, when they ven- ture our own sweet native tongue, is pitiful indeed.
This is rather a shame, since Gaelic is a language particularly rich in invective which cannot adequately be translated into any other. Were the Commissioners in Brussels to be cursed competently in Gaelic they would know what had hit them without picking up the earphones for the simultaneous translation. The trouble is that the Irish present could not be per- suaded to put the earphones on them- selves, for fear of being ridiculed back home as not being in possession of the dear acid tongue, the native language, the pure echt Irish Irish, the trumpet of the Gael.
For the same reason, contributions in Irish to debate in the Oireachtas (the Dublin Parliament) are rare, though less rare in Seanad Eireann (the Senate) than in the Dail (the lower house). That is because the Seanad, a corporatist institu- tion invented by De Valera while still under the influence of Signor Mussolini and Professor Salazar, contains, by law, representatives of the universities and the learned professions. Members of the Dail, on the other hand, wherein legislative power rests, are largely incapable even of insulting one another in the mother tongue.
An attempt is to be made to remedy the deficiency. So soon as members of the Oireachtas return from their summer holi- days, they will find that a room has been set aside for them in Leinster House, the Westminster of Eire, equipped with in- structional tapes and staffed by kindly tutors, so that they may graduate to a proficiency sufficient to allow them to ask questions of government ministers without recourse to the Saxon parlance (Sacs- Bhearla', a second official language, as described in the same Constitution). The present position is that only one question of a priority nature may be taken each day during Question Time (another Saxon in- heritance) in the true tongue but a par- liamentary Joint Committee, after labour- ing through 24 meetings since May of last year, has decided that the quota should be upped to at least two.
(I do personally think that no one not fully capable of his own first national official language should be allowed to set foot in his nation's parliament, let alone open his mouth in it, but politics is the language of priorities or priorities the language of politicians, or whatever it was that the sage Bevan laid down, and it is a certain priority in Eire that any politician who wishes to be elected shall pretend, at least, the command of Erse. That the first, and only, language of 94 per cent of the population of the Republic is English is an irrelevant frippery.) Our amiable, unpopular prime minister (or `Taoiseach', signifying 'clan chieftain') has in his bumbling, honest way announced that one question in Irish is enough to be `If you want Stevie Wonder's autograph, pretend to be black.' going on with, as he finds it difficult enough to think on his feet in the second official language, never mind the first. He complains of the bad acoustics in Leinster House as being an impediment to the clear apprehension of Gaelic, a notably guttural expression best conducted in the open air and at some distance from the person whom one is addressing, or else in the bar of a public house whose floor is liberally strewn with rushes or sawdust for the absorption of spit. The plain point is that he is bad at it, as C. J. Haughey, the Taoiseach-in-waiting, is not. Charlie, a Dubliner who passes himself off from time to time as either a Mayoman or a Kerry- man, spends most of the summer in the extremity of the Dingle peninsula, an allegedly Gaelic-speaking area (or 'Gael- tacht'), which attracts state subsidy (see The Poor Mouth, by Flann O'Brien, an excellent comic novel on the subject) for the reason that some of the natives are able to greet foreigners on the road with the question, in Gaelic, 'Have you Irish on you?' The appropriate answer is have not,' whereupon all present retire to Kru- ger Kavanagh's public house (he being long dead) where toasts are raised to the health of the munificent, Gaelic-loving Republic and Charlie, as his helicopter waits on the Gaelic greensward to take him to his private adjacent island, improves his syntax. The last politician who had com- plete command of Irish and chose to sojourn in Dunquin, hard by Kruger's pub and Charlie's island, was Conor Cruise O'Brien, who loved in Dail Eireann to confound his Republican enemies by answering them in mellifluous Gaelic, not one word of which they could understand.
Dr FitzGerald particularly objects to supplementary questions being asked in the Dail in Irish. That is because he would not know what they mean. Pleading bum acoustics as excuse, he could resort to the earphones, or to some whispered and possibly suspect translation from his front- bench colleagues, but in either case he would be observed and his inability to speak his own language exposed. The same inhibitions are acutely felt by other mem- bers of the Oireachtas. They cannot be seen to demonstrate an ignorance of Irish because it would damage them politically.
The pretence in Eire is that we can speak our own language. We cannot. It is a terrible pity that we cannot, for it is a very splendid and ancient language and much older than any of the Latin or Teutonic. The independent state of Eire, whose founders rose in bloody rebellion and civil war so that we should be a Gaelic nation once again, has not so far succeeded in 65 years that the prime minister should be able to answer two questions in Irish and should be so little ashamed of his inabil- ity as to admit it in public.
It is the fact that twice as many speak fluent Gaelic in Scotland as in Ireland. Meanwhile, under the Anglo-Irish Agree-
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