Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: Colin Ryan on the
          renaissance of Irish Gaelic.

          "TA DHA THEANGA... ..GIORRA DON BHEAL."

          Jill Kitson: In Irish Gaelic, Colin Ryan was saying, 'I speak two of the
languages of this country: English and Irish. As the proverb says, "What's closest to the heart is closest to the mouth."

          What's true for Colin Ryan here and now was not true for many Irish, Catholic Irish, at the end of the 18th century, when the first Irish convict settlers were transported to New South Wales. Writing about the politics of Gaelic in his book 'States of Mind', the historian Oliver McDonough charts the rapid decline of the language from the mid-18th century. By 1801, when our statistical information effectively begins, he says, only half of the population was monolingually Irish-speaking. Fifty years later this proportion had fallen to 5%, and less than 25% of Irish people could even speak the language. Fifty years later still, in 1901, the proportions were respectively, 5% and 14%. Moreover, monolingual Irish speakers were now practically confined to the western and south-western seaboards. There were only seven monolingual rish speakers left in the entire province of Leinster.

          Why? By and large, Oliver McDonough says, because to struggling Irish peasants, English was seen to be the language of law, politics, business and advancement, and as the language needed by the emigrant escaping poverty, and later, the famine. Whereas Irish Gaelic was seen as 'the badge of poverty and failure.'

          Paradoxically a more romantic view of Gaelic, as a link to Ireland's
pre-Catholic culture, prevailed among Irish Protestants, who in the early 19th century started and then sustained the movement to preserve the Irish language, with some success. One hundred years later, in the Irish Free State, Gaelic was the language of officialdom, was taught in all primary schools and was a condition of entry to the National University. Yet today, as two centuries ago, English is the lingua franca of Ireland and of the Irish Diaspora.

          What's the meaning of Gaelic now to Irish identity? Well, with his answer to that question, here's Colin Ryan, a third-generation Irish Australian who produces and presents the Irish Gaelic program for SBS Radio in Melbourne.

          Colin Ryan: Irish, Irish Gaelic, is my second language; I didn't learn it in Ireland, but in Australia. It's a language whose history in this country began in the late 18th century. From then until the latter half of the 19th century, it was the first language of many of the Irish who came here. But it wasn't much use in Australia; it became the private language of the old, or something spoken in a quiet corner of the pub. It was a language that
slipped away, as though the wind had lifted it.

          Irish is pungent, epigrammatic; it has passionate songs, and one of the oldest literatures in western Europe. Its sisters are Scots Gaelic and Manx, its cousins Welsh, Cornish and Breton. All are assumed to have descended from the language of those Celts who arrived in the British Isles at the end of the Bronze Age. But that language changed when it encountered the speech of the indigenous inhabitants. From this fusion of accents, grammars and vocabulary, Irish was born. A Celtic mythology was introduced with gods like the many-skilled Lugos, who in Ireland was to become Lugh.

          But an older world of prickly, unreliable spirits lived on, and those places already sacred, remained so. Irish society and its language developed organically through the centuries, absorbing many influences, though coloured by a fascinating archaism. The stifling began in the 17th century with the effective imposition of English rule, and was almost completed by 1890. Many of the Irish were both poor and ambitious, and they saw that it was easier to prosper with English, the vehicle of power. But some, often urban and middle-class, had a different dream. It was they who set in train a remarkable revival movement, linked to both cultural and political nationalism. It proved easier to create a state than to re-establish a language. But Irish began to prosper, in a modest way. It acquired a modern literature, a radio network, a place as a vehicle of scholarship. Now it has a television network and has achieved something inconceivable, even 20 years ago: it has become fashionable.

          So, who speaks Irish? Thousands of native speakers in scattered western parishes; thousands of others who learnt it at school, and who have chosen to maintain it; a handful of people, often with no Irish connections who live in Italy, Russia, Germany or Australia. To me, Irish is a language of this country. It has in it the gumtrees of my childhood, the streets of a Melbourne suburb, the heat of Australian summers. It's a language in which I speak to my daughter, in which I broadcast and in which I write. I'm conscious of its history here, but also of its general irrelevance to the history of the community which brought it here.

          The Irish liked Australia, but their language hindered integration, and integration was something they wanted. It was their chance to fight on equal terms. The Americans, ever inventive, had devised a sentimental culture in English for the Irish exile, and this was useful in Australia, even when attenuated. To survive here, the Irish language needed cohesive local communities speaking a common dialect. This occurred, for example, in
Koroit, in south-western Victoria, where the Irish all came from County Clare. but these conditions seldom obtained. In general, the language was left to the occasional scholar and to the old.

          When I began learning the language some 30 years ago, my enthusiasm was viewed as eccentric. Everyone knew that Gaelic was dead. Even Latin would have been more useful. Some people still think that Gaelic is dead; an encouraging number are now aware that it is not. Why did I learn Irish? Ireland wasn't a part of my childhood in any significant way. It was a country on the margins of consciousness. Our parish priest was Irish; we had a large library at home with 19th century versions of Irish history. Beyond that, there was little. My great-grandparents had come here from Southern Ireland during the Gold Rush, and we had become solidly Australian. But I liked languages and the worlds they could reveal. Perhaps Irish promised me a world of my own. From an early time I was aware, despite all, that my people's past lay elsewhere, a Dreaming remote in distance, though near in time.

          Over the years I learned enough of other languages to read their literatures, but Irish lives on my tongue. Irish is not the easiest of languages for an English speaker. Its vocabulary is strange, its nouns are declined at both ends, its consonants take time to master. Embedded in it are words deeply native to a certain geography: the vocabulary of turf-cutting and many kinds of rain. Yet it's a language which was acclimatised to new worlds, as Spanish was, or English. The Irish scattered far enough to make it possible. One thinks of Washington's Irish-speaking regiments raised in Pennsylvania, of the bonded labourers from Cork and Connemara sent to the far West Indies in the 1600s, of the convicts sent here. But the gains of that dispersal have now been lost, and must be reinvented.

          This is particularly so for the writer. The stories I write in Irish are published only in Ireland, yet they can be seen as an attempt to deal with the peculiar situation of the language in this country. If I write in English I use a language which has had time to adapt to Australia, to a different light, a new history, a new society. It has its own vernacular and accent. Something like  this has also happened with community languages like Italian, but Italian is the first or second language of a whole community. Irish in this country is much more the language of scattered individuals. As an Australian who writes in Irish, I must accomplish in my own lifetime the linguistic adaptation which 200 years have accomplished in English.

          I've said that Irish has become fashionable. In Australia, this means that every year a few score of us go to language classes, and that a very small minority eventually become fluent. Irish is fashionable partly because Ireland is fashionable. Thousands of Australians visit Ireland every year. They see the house their great-grandmother was born in and Irish relatives (often indifferent); a shining image compounded of round towers, enchanted light and a green landscape. For some, the Irish language is part of all this. I once interviewed a young Melbourne woman who became so fascinated by traditional Gaelic singing while on holiday that she learned Irish and now works in the Aran Islands.

          There's a traditional story about a man called Tomas Bui Uraid, who dreamed that if he went to a certain bridge, he would be told there of a treasure. He went to the bridge and met an old man who told him that he himself had had a dream. 'What was the dream?' said Tomas. 'I dreamed', said the old man, 'that there was treasure to be found beside the house of a man called Tomas Bui Uraid.' Tomas returned to his own house and dug up a pot of gold. This story, so local and archetypal, the story of the search and of the roundabout discovery, has something to say about the Irish in Australia and their language.

          When Ireland became independent, the State assumed a duty to promote the language. Irish became compulsory in the schools. But where could you use it outside the school? And for what? Irish was still spoken in remote districts, but these places were poor, the remnants of an older world. Yet from these, and the cities, came writers and activists who fought for the language. Whatever we owe to them, the fact remains that English is the language through which the modern Irish identity was formed.

          This has had interesting cultural consequences. Other small nations like Estonia, or Norway, achieved modernity through a language of their own. Ireland did it through a borrowed tongue whose metropolitan centre lay elsewhere. This doesn't overtly trouble more than a few, though agitation for the language has always played upon a lingering, hidden unease. In the Australian environment, Ireland itself quickly became ornamental; although Irish was second only to English as a language of settlement, it has left hardly a trace, either in vocabulary or accent. Now that assimilation is complete, Australians can allow themselves the luxury of Irish lessons. The language is no longer a threat. For some perhaps, it's almost a necessity. This is something entirely new, like the very phrase, 'Irish-Australian'. If you ask Australians why they're learning Irish, they will almost invariably tell you it has something to do with their origins. No doubt other motives are concealed in this phrase, motives as various as the individuals. But it's also true, surely, that it allows the expression of an aspect of identity long suppressed, and yet felt to be vital.

          Few people can bear to be rootless. We must all come from somewhere, and language is a fundamental vehicle of identity. Not many feel the need to speak their past by learning Irish, but that even a few should do so, is significant.

          Over 70 language are spoken in Australia, some of them indigenous, the rest imported. A few of these like Greek, or Vietnamese, owe some of their importance to the number of their speakers. But even if immigration were to be reduced, these and other languages would retain some cultural weight. There would always be Australians who would want to speak them, read them, even write them. The cultural importance of French in Australia is far greater than the number of its speakers here. Irish, because of its history here, and its place in European culture, should be equally important. Even in this century, many immigrants have brought it with them. Some are Gaeilgeori, people who learned Irish as a second language, and continue to  speak it. Others belong to that handful of native speakers who see no reason why their first language should die in a new country. One day the universities may give Irish the recognition it deserves. One day we may see an Australian literature in the Irish language. Is searbh an t-ean a labhrann leis fein: 'Bitter
the bird who sings only to itself.'

Jill Kitson: SBS broadcaster Colin Ryan. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
 
 

                            © 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation