This post might contain spelling mistakes and grammar errors but pass no remarks. As the tshirts say “briste” (broken or bad) Irish is better than “cliste” (clever or perfect) English.

So I have decided to learn Irish…..again…. or if you prefer it….yet again. The Irish Language is undergoing a revival and new President, Catherine Connolly will be instrumental in making it more commonplace.

Irish….first year in grammar school in 1963 . I cant say that I enjoyed it or was in any way passionate about it. It seemed unnecessary. And I choose my words carefully. It seemed alien. There was nothing “Belfast-ish” about it, Seán and Síle in the basic text book lived in a cottage and they had a “bó” and a “muc”. They sat on a stól and they drank a cupan of báinne.

There were of course men on Falls Road who spoke Irish and even wore a fáinne to indicate proficiency and a pioneer pin to demonstrate Catholic sobriety. Often both. It seemed they liked the GAA more than real football and some had a vague whiff of cordite about them. Not really my people. And as if to underscore dereliction, there was the Ard Scoil (across Divis Street), the spiritual home of the Irish language in Belfast.

There were young married couples who were building houses in West Belfast where they could build an Irish speaking community. It seemed an eccentric thing to do…as peculiar as being a vegetarian or installing solar panels would be in 2025.

I did get an O level in 1968. And to be fair I never denied having an Irish O level. And you may wonder why would anyone deny having an Irish O level. After all seven O levels is better than six O levels. But at a job interview, the prospective employer might tell you that Irish does not count or should not count.

Of course in 2025, if any prospective employer told that to teenagers like Oisín, Cillian, Saoirse and Caoimhe, they would be at some Equality quango and they would be alright when compensation sets in.

The 1970s and Irish was at one level irrelevant and on another level was a bit dangerous to be associated.

It is undoubtedly true that promotion of Irish was a key part of Republican and later Sinn Féin philosophy and for someone like myself, not being associated with fundamentalist republicans was very important.

Married in 1982 and with a toddler child needed nursery education and the only place we could get was an Irish language nursery. And our child picked up the language. Baa Baa Caora Dubh, Rudolf an Fia Rua, Daidi na Nollaig….great stuff.

One afternoon I decided to surprise the child by picking him up as he left school. I got into conversation with another parent and his Irish was pretty good. I apologised that I did not know much gaelic and he laughed and said that he spoke fluent jailic (sic). Yes I might have been not a big fan of Irish at grammar school. But my fellow parent had been a big fan at the University of Long Kesh.

I had no reservations about this.

But a few months later my wife and I attended an interview for a primary school. I had a few reservations about the financial commitment expected of us but as we got into our car my wife said “the child is not going to that school”. She had noticed that there was no female on the interview panel.

Of course in the 1990s, Irish became more acceptable. And I enrolled in some classes. I can only get to a certain point and I give up.

And after 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement, we have a phoney parity of esteem and to make Irish even more accepted, we were introduced to Ulster Scots.

A government policy Líofa was introduced as a way of getting more Irish spoken. I attended the launch at Stormont. I even blogged about it in one of my first posts here. On reflection it was a lot of diddly dee music, photogenic school children, senior and junior PSNI officers and Sinn Féin and SDLP politicians (and to be fair, Basil McCrea and John McCallister of DUP dropped in).

I signed up to Líofa and …….well there was a Newsletter and details of evening classes and er..that was it.

Yes kids speak it at school. My grandson (almost 9) is in Primary 5 and there are four classes. He is in one of three taught in the medium of English. The fourth is taught thru Irish. He is (proud grandfather boast) the Irish Speaker of the Month in his class.

How exactly does a person learn a language? Well my baby grandson will be fluent in English when he is 2 years old. It cannot be that hard if babies can learn a language.

And I suppose if I was sentenced to twenty years in a Japanese prison, I would be fluent when I was released.

I suppose the key is that if you NEED to learn a language, you will learn.

But what exactly is fluency? About fifteen years ago, I bought some Irish dictionaries. Not just a general foclóir. I bought media, biology and flora and fauna dictionaries. Even if I style myself as fluent in English, I would have to be a birdwatcher to actually recognise a Great Northern Diver so knowing that it is Loma Mor in Irish is not really useful.

How many words….nouns…is the minimum required to be considered fluent?

How many adjectives, verbs and adverbs etc?

But why I am I buying into idea of learning Irish?

Am I buying into a notion of Irish exceptionalism? I would normally abhor the the thought of exceptionalism as demonstrated by Americans, English or Israelis. But their exceptionalism is based on the belief in superiority. They are “better” than everyone else. If the Irish believe anything about ourselves, it is we are “as good as anyone else”. Not better.

And the world in the last ten years has given us a confidence that our “betters” in USA, England, Israel…and Russia, China for that matter…are actually awful people. And that maybe in Ukraine and Palestine, those people are as good as anyone else.

And locally…the great experiment of 1998…Power Sharing, Parity of Esteem, LetsGetAlongerism, has failed. There is no point in communicating with unionists. We do not actually need unionists so why pander to them.

Time to do our own thing. Be Irish…

A Celtic Revival. It may not be Lady Gregory and Yeats and Synge, Michael Cusack and the GAA and the Gaelic League. But it seems to be about Katie Taylor, Cillian Murphy, Dara O’Briain.

Circa 1900, it all led to a new independent Ireland.

And in 2025 “Ourselves” has a ring to it.