Why Living in Wales Made Me Want to Learn Irish

For the three months prior I had been studying in Wales, and its language was everywhere: Twitter wars, Starbucks orders, the Lidl bread aisle. 10% of adults over 25 claim to speak the language daily and by 2050, the Welsh government even plans to have 40% of its students taught through it.

That was why, when choosing whether to say the film’s name in Irish (or Gaeilge) instead of English, I had a moment of doubt. In the UK, the Irish language (and in most cases, the entirety of its culture) is treated as an amusing quirk, to the extent that I’d forgotten the strange politics surrounding it back home. 

Irish is a compulsory subject in school in the Republic of Ireland, however, since I spent much of my childhood in England, I was granted an exemption. This was much to the envy of my classmates, the majority of whom hated learning it. 

The terrors of the Irish classroom are such that only 21% of students leave school feeling fluent. A paltry 2% of adults over 25 speak it daily (compared to 20% of Welsh adults.) And despite the fact that in 2010, the Irish government launched a plan to increase the number of fluent Irish speakers to 250,000 by 2030, critics have derided the initiative as totally unrealistic. The interest just isn’t there.

Which is why the phenomenal success of An Cailín Ciuin has been so unexpected. Grossing over £1M in the UK and Ireland box office, and having been nominated for numerous film awards, it is the most successful Irish-language film ever. Based on the novel Foster by Clare Keegan, which follows the story of a young, abused girl in 1980s Ireland who is sent to live with distant relatives, it has deeply resonated with people from all over the world. 

There was a pleasant rhyme to the words so that even years later, I could still remember them clearly. But they were the only bits of the language I ever heard. My parents never spoke Irish. It had been a silly nursery rhyme my dad had invented because we all found the word smig funny.    

So it was when Aisling told me about after feeling embarrassed in front of the girl from Hong Kong, how she went up to her parents and she asked them, “Why can’t we speak Irish?” and how they didn’t really have an answer, that I felt like I understood something deeper about my malaise towards the language. I had at one point asked my parents the same thing. They didn’t really have an answer either.

It was funny to discover at some point in my teens that my granny actually grew up speaking Irish as a first language. She was born in Gweedore, a small town in an Irish-speaking area known in Donegal as the Gaeltacht. Like most Gaeltachtí, it has suffered great historic economic and population decline.

“There was nothing else for it, only emigration,” my granny says to me now. She’s talking about her own ancestors, who left in droves for England and America, taking their language with them.  “Speaking Irish was considered a drawback to anyone who had to move.”

My granny herself moved away from her hometown at the age of 17 to become a primary school teacher. There was a huge push to promote Gaeilge in schools in the mid twentieth century, under the relatively newly established Republic of Ireland government - part of a revival of Irish culture that had been beaten down under centuries of British rule. 

She married my granddad, a farmer who only spoke English, and though she maintained a love for the Irish, she never pushed it on her children growing up. She says to me that they didn’t want to speak it; that it wasn’t “cool.” The language had the affectation of the old and the traditional, compared to the more modern, anglicised regions of the country.