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Tongue of my father

Liam Carson

Do Liam, atá ag claoi lena dhúchas. For Liam, who is cleaving to his tradition. Do Liam, nach bhfuil eagla air níos mó. For Liam, who is no longer afraid. These are the book dedications that Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill writes for me after a recent reading. I have been talking to her in Irish for the first time, having spoken English at our previous encounters. I tell her what my fears were - that I might not understand her, that I lacked confidence in Irish. Shortly after, Nuala sends me an e-mail. Molaim go mór an t-athrú teangan. Ná bíodh aon lag-mhisneach ort, tá sé agat, fiú i ngán fios díot féin. She is delighted that I have switched languages, tells me not to lack courage; I have the language, even if I don't know it myself.

Dhúchas. This word is frequently translated into English as heritage. A word that is full of death and stasis. But to an Irish speaker, it means one's native place, a shared tradition, a collective soul, a kindred affection, a natural affinity. Filleadh ar do dhúchas. To return home, to where one belongs, to revert to kind. It is something that is bidding me a prodigal's welcome after many years.

For my father, Liam MacCarráin, Irish was a place of refuge. He was once interviewed for Radio Ulster's Tearmann - where guests were asked what gave them sanctuary in their lives. He chose the Irish language itself. He hid within and took comfort from words. The language itself was another world, something parallel - and magical - to the mundane world.

In his book Is Cuimhin Liom an t-Ám (I Remember the Time) he described his awakening to the beauty of Irish.

Work

In 1930 - at the age of fourteen - he started work as a telegraph messenger for the Royal Mail. There he met Ruairi Ó Maolchallan and Padaí Ó hÉigeartaigh and found himself spellbound listening to their Irish - faoi dhraíocht acu ag comhrá le chéile i nGaeilge. Fired by his determination to master the language as much as possible and as quickly as possible, he attended two classes a week. He practised his Irish at socials in An Cumann Gaelach, where he would meet migrant mill-workers, girls from the Donegal gaeltacht. After two years, he went for the Fáinne test, where he was examined by Domhnall Ó Grianna, brother of famed Donegal writers Seamus Ó Grianna and Seosamh Mac Grianna. His examination was short and sweet - Domhnall simply asked him if he was Liam MacCarráin. 'Is mise', replied my father, whereupon the Fáinne was pinned to his lapel. He was already famous for his outstanding command of Irish.

My family still has a copy of the January 1950 issue of An tUltach. The magazine is in the old Gaelic script, and uses the old spellings. On the front page, there is a photo of my mother with my sister Caitlín and brother Ciaran, who's only a toddler. The Carsons are ‘family of the month’. The article tells how Caitlín ‘has a few words of English that she learnt from children in the street but she only speaks Irish at home’. The author laments the fact that Ciaran will have to learn English at school - but proceeds to remark that while it may not be unusual to hear adults in Belfast speaking Irish, it is wondrous to hear it in the mouths of children. The author wonders if ‘this land will ever change’. English is a ‘cause for sadness’ in our lives. Here is my family, in the days before I was born, urban pioneers urging the rebirth of a language and a spirit.

1960s

I grew up speaking Irish in 1960s Andersonstown. It was house Irish, home Irish, an Irish of the heart. It was a language that felt warm. At Holy Child Primary School, I was regarded as a curiosity, an exotic eccentric nicknamed ‘Fluent’. The other boys would poke and provoke me – ‘Go on then, Fluent, say something in Irish. How do you say fuck?’ The only other family in Mooreland that spoke Irish were the Bradys - the real thing, from the Donegal gaeltacht. As a child, I played with Kevin Brady, who was later gunned down by Michael Stone in Milltown Cemetary.

With the arrival of the Troubles, the linguistic lie of the land changed in my home. My mother spoke Irish less and less. Once it had meant freedom for her. She would still talk about how the best days of her life had been in Donegal, when the language meant clean air, little cottages, hillside walks, simple pleasures. But, in her mind, Irish was now linked to republicanism, to the IRA, to violence. She was afraid, I think, that if we were to be heard speaking Irish, we might be considered Provos. She would also remark that Irish wasn't much use when it came to getting a job.

It was as if a centuries-old shame of the language had come back to visit us. It is not that long since the Catholic Church taught its flock that Irish was the ‘language that confuses men’, something that seems hard to believe when we recall how the Christian Brothers relentlessly drilled us in Irish grammar. First the clerics ripped an teanga - the tongue - from our mouths, and then, generations later, and much too late, shoved it back down our throats.

Punk

By 1977, I was listening to the first punk bands. From a safe, stable, suburb, Andersonstown had become a war-zone. Helicopters hovered over our house all night; gun-battles would last into the dawn. After six, the city centre was a place of desolation and dread. The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, The Buzzcocks and The Stranglers were the soundtrack of my teenage years, their brittle, edgy songs reflecting my violent urban reality.

My Da was now in his sixties, seeking solace in the world of the Blasket and Donegal writers - Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Séamas Ó Grianna, and Micí MacGabhann - wonderful stuff that I would only appreciate much later. Our cultures and worlds seemed oceans apart. I was thinking in English, he was dreaming in Irish. He saw the chasm growing between us. I was reading new wave science-fiction - revolutionary, surreal, dark, dystopian, nihilistic fiction light-years removed from my Da's beloved Jules Verne, H.G.Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In my youthful arrogance, I saw my father dreaming of a mythical Gaelic land that could never be. He and his gaeilgeoir friends, I thought, lived in a room just off the reality I knew. I imagined them sitting in the corner of Cluain Ard in Hawthorne Street, recalling better days in Rann na Feirste, talking about the language itself hour after hour. Outside the city was on fire with hate. They were in their sanctuary.

Discussion

One day, the Da told me he needed to have an important discussion. He knew it wasn't always easy for me to speak in Irish, and that I was living in a new world very different from that of his youth. If I wanted to use English, he would understand. 'Maith go leor', I said. We continued to speak in Irish. I was afraid to break his heart, to fail him, or to betray what he loved most.

Once I went to college in Dublin, and then on to the squatland of 1980s south London, I spoke Irish very rarely. Occasionally it would emerge as a drunken party piece. At times I would cringe listening to myself, speaking to people who hadn't a clue what I was saying.

At Christmas, I would come home. My father's greeting was always the same - first a bear hug, and then the question 'an bhfuil ocras ort? Ar mhaith leat friochú?' Are you hungry? Do you want a fry-up?

On one of these visits, he told me that he had no idea what I did with my life, but that he wanted me to know that there was always a home for me to return to, where himself and my mother would respect my privacy. There would always be food and a bed for me. A haven I could come to if I was in trouble.

I remember my first visit to the gaeltacht - to Mín a' Chladaigh - at the age of eleven. Shy and alone, I wanted to go back to Belfast. Cumhaidh is what gripped me - pining, loneliness, homesickness, a soreness of the heart, longing. This Irish word contains in its sound an ache that no English word can evoke for me.

Decades later, in 2003, my girlfriend Niamh and I are in Donegal, where she is touring her children's puppet show, Luichín na Cathrach agus Luichín na Tuaithe - The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. I make an effort to speak Irish to the venue organizers, and begin to feel comforted by its sounds and its rhythms. Part of me feels that I am at home here. On our way towards Gaoth Dobhair we discover a townland called Tearmann. In our bed and breakfast at Dún Lúiche, the bean an tí asks if I have a cúpla focal. 'Giota beag níos mó ná sin', I reply. A wee bit more than that.

From then on, she mostly speaks Irish to me. There is a willingness to connect, and to make me feel at ease with what is undoubtedly my inferior Irish.

Bookshop

We travel to Gleann Cholm Cille, where we pay a visit to the Oideas Gael bookshop. There I buy a couple of poetry collections by Cathal Ó Searcaigh - and Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues, by Gearóid MacLochlainn. This book shatters my ignorant notions of what exists within Irish literature. MacLochlainn writes about my home - west Belfast. I recognize myself and my city in these poems. Here are the binlids, the soldiers, the helicopters, the sirens, the half-bricks, the plastic bullets and the Molotov cocktails. Here are people listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson and smoking spliffs. Here are people swimming between Irish and English. Ó Searcaigh combines a profound knowledge and love of his Donegal tradition - the poets and storytellers who came before him - with the sensibility of somebody who has read Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lorca and Cavafy.

I learn that some of the most engaged, modern, innovative, lively and beautiful writing emerging from Ireland is in Irish. I become like a thirsty man, drinking from a long-forgotten well. Caithfear pilleadh arís ar na foinsí says Ó Searcaigh - we will have to return to the springs.

Dead

My father has been dead six years now. I am nearly the same age he was when I was born. In photographs, I see the contours of my face beginning to resemble his. But what survives most of him is his voice, and the Irish language. When I dream of him, he is always speaking in Irish. I am beginning to dream more often in Irish. Sometimes when I am a little drunk, I'll open a book - recently, the wonderfully strange and surreal fiction of Connemara author Micheál Ó Conghaile - and read without the aid of a dictionary. All these magical words I don't know or have forgotten. But I trust to the flow, the context, the feel, the vibe of the sentences. I sense the shimmer of their meaning. In the morning, I check the words, and I am often right, or at least half-right. There comes a point where one must stop translating constantly, and begin to see and hear the words in their own territory, not existing as an annex to English.

In the human flood that is modern Dublin, where I now live, I begin to seek out other Irish speakers, and am pleasantly surprised by how many of us there are, or by how much people will use it if only they are addressed in the language. I introduce snatches of Irish in my work e-mails, and receive replies in Irish. The European Union circus is in town, and the cold men and women who call the shots drive by in cavalcades of limousines. Éamon Ó Cuív, our minister for the Gaeltacht - the man entrusted to defend Irish - will not ask these people for Official Status for the Irish language. English is the language of power and commerce, and who are we to argue with that? The old shame endures - even in the hearts of the warriors of destiny.

But language and friendship are viruses, and in these, I find hope. The more people you meet who can speak the language, the more it will become part of your life, and the more it will grow in your soul. Is beatha teanga í ag labhairt - the life of a language is in its speaking. In a hotel bar in Parnell Square, I chat with new friends Gabriel and Eithne Rosenstock. Gabriel has just published a lovely memoir of their travels in the East, Olann Mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis. In his poetry, east meets west, barriers are broken, bridges are built between cultures.

Ireland no longer exists in isolation from the rest of the world. The streets of Dublin are full of new sounds, new words - from Africa, from eastern Europe, from China. Cathal Ó Searcaigh has suggested that this flux ‘of cultural multiplicity, of linguistic diversity; of inevitable hybridity’ might well provide Irish with the soil within which it can flourish. The purist ideal is gone, and now there is a recognition that cultures need not exist in opposition. In celebrating the difference of other cultures, we can find a way to remind ourselves of our own difference, our own dúchas.

Will Irish survive? My answer is an emphatic yes. It will not be the language of the past, because we are not the people of the past. It will survive because we are finally shaking off the shackles of shame about our own identity. It will survive because a generation ago, men and women like my father and mother gave their children something that could not be erased. It will endure because there must always be a return to one's own tearmann and to dúchas, where something of one's soul and being is kept alive. It is a blessing that - finally, and before it was too late - I have returned to the linguistic sanctuary my father bequeathed me, for which I am eternally grateful.

P r e v i e w
Issue 424

Mischief making and cowardice – the betrayal of the Human Rights Commission
Having completed a five year term as a member of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, I welcome this invitation to reflect on that experience.
by Harold Good

Spookaticci
This book has been long awaited. Since 1999 when allusions to a senior British agent operating in the highest echelons of the IRA began to filter into public discourse, unease mixed with fascination has permeated the psyche of the republican constituency. Many believed and some hoped that once Stakeknife was unmasked it would reveal a high profile politician.
by Anthony McIntyre

Tongue of my father
Do Liam, atá ag claoi lena dhúchas. For Liam, who is cleaving to his tradition. Do Liam, nach bhfuil eagla air níos mó. For Liam, who is no longer afraid. These are the book dedications that Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill writes for me after a recent reading. I have been talking to her in Irish for the first time, having spoken English at our previous encounters.
by Liam Carson

Iraq’s Mercenary Armies
Amongst all the bloodshed in Iraq, it is hardly surprising that the death of one South African and the wounding of five others in a bomb attack in Baghdad at the beginning of February should have attracted little international attention. Yet the story behind their presence in Iraq is an instructive one, with both chilling and poignant dimensions. The dead man was Frans Strydom, a former member of Koevoet, a notorious counter-insurgency unit that operated in Namibia in the 1980s.
by Adrian Guelke

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