THE NATIVE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE OF IRELAND ARE ALIVE AND WELL IN THE COUNTRY’S GAELTACHT REGIONS
BY J R Patterson FROM HEMISPHERES FOR UNITED AIRLINES
LANGUAGE IS MUSIC.
Each tongue has its particular cadence, rhythm and tone, and finds a natural partner in one musical form or another. German is a march. Italian carries the trills of baroque chamber music. The Irish language, when I first overhear it in a pub in western Ireland, reaches my ears like an old hymnal, its chordal tang ancient and elegiac.
The men upon whom I’m eavesdropping are bent forward, as though discussing mortality—until they burst out laughing and drain their pints. It leaves me feeling, in the words of Irish writer Maurice O’Sullivan, “like a dog listening to music.”
I see this as tús maith—a good beginning, a chance to see a familiar place anew. Ireland has become part of the global community, but the Gaeltacht regions, or An Ghaeltacht, are the root from which the shamrock has bloomed; deeper, darker and full of ortha an dul amú— the charm of concealment.
My ancestors were forced from the country by famine and land reforms during the 19th century, when the Gaeilge language (also known as Irish Gaelic) was at its nadir. The lingual tie to their homeland was severed, but in Ireland a steadfast few still hold their end of the link. Wanting to know what I might glean from hearing that ancestral sound, I’ve come to the shredded western coast, from Dingle to Connemara to Donegal, where one can still catch those hymns in the air.
It’s no coincidence that the coast is where the Irish language retains its strongest hold. While English became dominant among both emigrants to the New World and the Irish who lived closer to Dublin, in the western part of the country the native language remained the connection to Gaelic culture.
Today, a coordinated effort among governments, schools, historians and enthusiasts safeguards these social and linguistic traditions. While almost 2 million Irish now claim to speak some aspect of the language, only about 70,000 speak it daily outside the education system. The majority are found in the counties of Galway, Monaghan, Donegal and Kerry, where I start my journey.
MY FIRST STOP IS the Dingle Peninsula, a finger of land sticking out into the Atlantic. The town of Dingle was once a parochial fishing village, its crooked lanes stacked with lobster pots and gillnets. It’s had a touc
