Learning (to be) Irish

It began with a poem I read, headed with an epigraph saying that there are only eighteen letters in the Irish alphabet. As a second-generation Irish woman, how had I reached the age of sixty-two without knowing this? Some Irish was spoken at home by my parents, the odd word or phrase, but apart from knowing that bainne is milk, I questioned none of it. ‘Oscail an doras,’ my dad would say. I have only recently learned that this means ‘Open the door’. There are other phrases that I recall phonetically, but have no idea how they are spelt, so their meaning remains hidden for now.

I started learning Gaeilge on Duolingo about three months ago.  Duolingo offers no grammar, only words and phrases that you learn by trial and error, so I supplemented my learning with a book, Learning Irish by Micheal O’Siadhail. I have tried translating the phrases at the end of the first chapter of the book three times, and have got no more than half of them right. Irish is a tough language to master. There are no words for yes and no, rather the verb in the question is repeated in the answer, in the affirmative or negative form. There is lenition to come to terms with – an aspect of Irish grammar that adds an h to the beginning of some words that come after certain other words, and change the pronunciation. There is eclipsis, too. I could try to explain, but as the experts sometimes do so by stating ‘see sentences in this chapter’, I am not sure that I could. 

Maria at the Cliffs of Moher in the 1990s

What I am coming to realise is that the Irish speak English in a way that’s influenced by Gaeilge. An Irish friend uses the phrase ‘Giving out’ to mean what I would call ‘Going into one’, or more precisely telling off, scolding, or complaining. This is a direct translation, so ‘Tá sí ag tabhairt amach’ means ‘She is giving out’.

I am sure that Irish turns of phrase have influenced me as a speaker and a writer, in spite of my years of denying I was Irish. I wrote about this in my first self-published pamphlet of prose and poetry, Learning to be English, and it was the subject of my first professional writing gig, as a columnist for BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths. This outlined how I went from being one of many Irish children at my Catholic primary school in Surrey, to being one of a few at grammar school. This was the time of IRA bombings on mainland Britain, and as we lived just a few miles from Guildford, the pub bombings by the IRA in 1974 were all too close. In fact, many years later, my brother told me that he usually drank in one of the pubs that was bombed when he was on day release at Guildford Technical College. The only reason he wasn’t in the pub that day and at that time was that he had flu. What I remember is my Physics teacher saying to me, in front of the class, ‘I see your lot have been at it again.’ I told no one at home what she had said, just silently decided that it was safer in that school to pretend that I wasn’t Irish, and become an English girl. Hence the title of my pamphlet, and of the piece that was broadcast on Home Truths: Learning to be English.

In common with many second-generation Irish people, I feel I have a dual identity, not quite one thing or the other. Neither fully English, nor fully Irish. Since I began to reclaim my Irish identity, in my thirties, I have been learning to be Irish, reversing the process of learning to be English that I went through in my teens. Like learning Gaeilge, it’s something that I may never master, that I shall carry on learning throughout my life.

My collection of short stories about Irish women living in England and their daughters is available here: As Long as It Takes.