Excerpts

6 February 2010

Yesterday I went to my first Irish language class at Ionad Uíbh Eachach. I arrived half an hour late after getting lost twice, but my teacher and classmates were very nice....

I have long debated how best to chronicle my MA research adventures, and going back through my journal, which I kept on a semi-regular basis, I discovered that it might be more enlightening to record in brief excerpts the bits and pieces that disclose the progression of my research -- and then to add a few words of explanation, beginning with the above.

As I may have written before, Ionad Uíbh Eachah is an Irish-medium nursery school in west Belfast, just off of the Falls Rd. As I only read the ad in the newspaper and had never visited the building before, I didn't realise until I arrived that I would be taking my Irish language class surrounded by 4 and 5 year old children, who were being immersed in the language on a daily basis. They would run up and down the hallway outside of our classroom and occasionally peer in at us until one of their teachers would shout to them in Irish to let the curious collection of adult-language-learning-oddities alone...

 19 February 2010

Today, I didn't go over much Irish with my housemate. We went over the Ár nAthair (Our Father) a few times, and the Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire (Hail Mary). Then it was a fairly long Latin session...

My housemate agreed to share his knowledge of Irish with me if I would teach him Latin. He would have been exposed to Irish prayers simply because of his Catholic upbringing; even in English language Mass, it is not uncommon for a prayer or song to be in Irish. On top of this, a year or two of instruction in Irish is required in most Northern Irish Catholic primary schools although Irish is not mandatory as it is in the Republic of Ireland. Despite the language's affiliation with Catholicism, in Belfast there is a monthly ecumenical service in Irish at one Presbyterian church, since many Scots Gaelic speakers (and Scots Gaelic would be more or less a dialect of Irish) would have come from Presbytertian Scottish stock. There is also, less surprisingly, an Irish language Mass every Sunday at the oldest Catholic church in Belfast. I went a few times to the latter and was intrigued by the international presence there. I suppose for non-English speakers, they might just as well attend an Irish service as an English one. However, each time I went there were only a handful of people in attendance, and one of the times I went, the priest never showed.

25 February 2010

The research lead that Fr. gave me ages ago just so happened to be in the Chaplaincy today. I know him from having seen him around, but I never realised that he was my research lead! So, we chatted a bit. His parents were involved in starting the first Irish school in west Belfast in 1971 on the Shaws Rd. He spoke about the relationship of the initial school(s) with Catholicism and the schools' relationship with the CCMS (Council of Catholic Maintained Schools) and the CnG (Comhairle na Gaelscoilleana). He texted his brother to get a copy of a recent documentary done on the first class in 1971 at the Shaws Rd school. He is also the chaplain at a dozen or so of these schools and can introduce me to people and take me to visit the schools. Also, there is now set up a course for Irish teachers in prep for teaching in gaelscoileanna.

(Gaelscoileanna are Irish-medium schools). Although I didn't know it at the time, the bit at the end of this excerpt is what I wrote my dissertation on: Irish-medium education teachers who did that course in Belfast. As for the remainder of the excerpt, suffice to say that the relationship of religion to schools in Northern Ireland is/can be complicated. There are the Catholic maintained schools, owned and run by the Catholic Church. There are the public schools, many of which have become de facto Protestant schools that nevertheless must cater to the remainder of the population. Of course, there are schools that opt out of this system, such as the integrated schools that bridge the gap between Northern Ireland's two main communities. The Irish-medium education schools opted out of the system, too, despite the fact that many people associate them with Catholicism. That is a debate I will not go into. In my own experience, most Irish language speakers I have encountered and most Irish-medium teachers do not associate the language with religion, and although the founders of the first Irish-medium school were from the Catholic community in west Belfast, the school's aims were cultural and not religious or political. Since the foundation of that school in 1971, the Irish-medium education sector in Northern Ireland has grown steadily.

5 March 2010

I went to Cumann Chluain Ard last night, and it was fantastic! No English is spoken at all; the emphasis is on speaking Irish, and so even explanations for unknown vocabulary are done through Irish. I am very excited to go again next week, even though transportation to and from class is purely by taxi. The class itself costs nothing but what one decides to donate at the end of the class. I understood about 95% for the first half of the class and 70% for the second half. However, I am under the impression that I'm picking the Ulster dialect up much more quickly than perhaps even I had anticipated.

Cumann Chluain Ard has enforced its ban on English since 1953 and was established much earlier, in 1936, as part of the island-wide cultural revival at that time. I think part of the biggest challenge to my Irish language classes and conversation circles was the dialect difference. I had experience with two other dialects, Munster and Connacht, before setting foot in Northern Ireland. On paper, the words are more or less the same, but the pronunciation sometimes completely threw me. Then, of course, there are certain words that nobody outside of Ulster would ever use. So, much of the time I sat quietly, because if I opened my mouth, the teacher would then have to take a few minutes to explain what it was I had just said. Now, things have reversed, and I'm not sure I'd understand Munster or Connacht Irish very well!

One of my most important learning experiences was attending two weeks of intensive language classes at Oideas Gael in the Donegal Gaeltacht over Easter 2010. I believe I already devoted a blog post to it, complete with pictures, but I don't think I included the following.

29 March 2010

I had a nice conversation with my classmate from Scotland. He is a Scots Gaelic speaker, and he told me a few things I thought were fascinating -- such as the existence in old languages of the "dual," not the singular or the plural: two is always different. There's "I" and "we" but "the two of us" is special. In some languages, such as Irish, this case is still visible. For instance, there is the singular "bliain amhain" and the plural "tri bliana" but two is "dha bhliain." It's reflected in English by the word "both."....

Part of the benefit of attending Oideas Gael, aside from the obvious linguistic improvement, was for the collective pool of knowledge brought together by speakers from all over Ireland and beyond, despite dialect differences and varying motivations to learn Irish. I have yet to learn any of the old Celtic languages, so this provided a welcome taster--although the excerpt is very rough, was hurriedly written, and contains only the gist of what was quite a long conversation. The majority of what I learned during the two week period was modern Irish. The first week, I kept to myself and studied, and my teacher confronted me afterward and told me to go out to the pub every night and that there I would learn best. She was absolutely right in this piece of advice; I spent the second week with my feet near the fire in one of the three pubs in the village. I never followed her other advice.

2 April 2010

Suffice to say, yes, I am exhausted from learning Irish, but when I approached the teacher today, her advice to me was simply: "You have very good Irish. Be confident. Practice. The best way is to get an Irish boyfriend." 

I don't make these things up!

A post in my journal on 29th April discloses the date I began to really crack down on my proper MA dissertation research--the result of rebelling against what my advisor had just told me to do. I don't mean this in any negative way. He was neither wrong in what he said nor in that his interests might have tendered results, but whereas most people emphasise the political constructs and contexts of everything in Northern Ireland, my interests were not necessarily political or religious, despite the fact that the status of the Irish language is intertwined with both, as my previous comments make clear. I suppose my unfavourable reaction to his instruction at least made me realise what it was I did want to do.

I pulled myself together, went to the library, and perused literature on language and tradition, language and ritual, language meaning and politics, the philosophy of language, and the nature of bilingualism. I left the library with seven new books at 12:30am.

The obvious point is that mornings are not my productive time of day. The other obvious point is that my fascination with language includes a broad spectrum of research areas -- which currently complicates my plans to begin a PhD program.

After my visit to Minnesota in June, I was so swamped with my research and job hunting that I wrote very little in my journal. It was a summer of networking, emailing, phoning, texting, pursuing potential interviewees, pursuing people who could lead me to more interviewees, conducting interviews, reading the last of the books and articles on my bibliography, having impromptu dance parties in my bedroom to Foy Vance and Mumford & Sons, moving house yet again, and organising a trip to the Donegal Gaeltacht where I prevailed upon the generosity of strangers (well...new friends, right?) to finish off my research at the various Irish language summer schools in the area. 

To be honest, I couldn't believe that I had been succesful once I had finished my Gaeltacht trip. Beforehand, I had received invaluable guidance from one of my contacts about where to go and where to stay in Donegal, and so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. The very night I arrived, I encountered one of my classmates from my Belfast Irish language class, on holiday with his family. I met his friends, and one of them was the first to give me a lift to one of the schools. It continued from there. Everybody always knew somebody else. Some people went out of their way to give me a lift to my next destination! It was Donegal hospitality at its very best, and on the one occasion when there was no other transportation to be had, I enjoyed the ride of my life on the Lough Swilly bus, careening around rocky corners of rural road, seats filled with locals, all of whom knew everybody else and chatted away to themselves and to me in a confusion of Irish and English, only to deposit me with all well wishes to the door of an Irish school on the edge of the Atlantic. Fresh, soft rain hit my face as soon as I stepped off and walked down towards the ocean.

I was welcomed wherever I went. My wrists were sore from jotting notes.  I had more interviews recorded on my mini digital device in one day (and I was there for four days) than I had in the month or so prior to my trip. At one school, I was offered a seat in an empty room and simply remained there as one interviewee after another entered and left. I was invited to attend various activities and at one point forced to play piano during one summer school's "concert." (Fur Elise is not Irish, no matter how you look at it! But it did break the ice, and the children came up to chat with me afterwards rather than be wary of me). It all worked out rather well in the end, with map in one hand and phone in the other, momentarily set back by delayed interviews and/or unavailable transportation. At the end of each day, I treated myself to a good meal and an occasional drink. Then, I would pass out from exhaustion.

The rest of it was writing....

On 15 September, I woke up at 9:00am to print off, bind and submit my completed dissertation. 9:15am. I made the horrifying discovery that not one word of my conclusion had been saved. From 9:16am to 10:16am I wrote an entirely new conclusion. 10:30am. I ran out the door to print it. 11:00am. I had two copies of my complete dissertation, hot off the press, in my hands. 11:10am. I arrived at the binders. 11:15am. I walked out of the binders. 11:30am. I submitted my two copies and received a receipt for doing so. I was done! Finished! Complete! 11:45am. I noticed that the PDF copy I had printed from had somehow blanked out whole words in my bibliography. 12:00pm. I stopped freaking out and went to chat to the ladies to whom I'd submitted my two copies. At 12:30pm, I was back at the binders, and an elderly nun was sitting on a chair in the corner and piped up in Irish when she found out my dissertation topic. 1:00pm. The two kind ladies accepted my two copies. Again. 1:02pm. In Maggie Mays with cheap wine and lots of food. 2:00pm. Asleep.