I was talking to my sister the other day on Skype. In the background I could hear my two year old nephew on the baby monitor, singing away to himself in the cot. She had just put him down for the night. Every so often I would hear his little voice chime in with ‘twinkle, twinkle, L-M-N-O-P, old McDonald had a farm’. He only turned two in October, but she has been teaching him nursery rhymes and songs since he was only a few months old, and there is no stopping him now. Last week she started trying to teach him a cupla focal. This may not seem so strange except for the fact that they live in Singapore; there is not a lot of use for the mother tongue in the Far East. When it’s bedtime, she whispers to him ‘tá Stephen ag dul a codladh‘ or some such sweet nothing…
Given the lack of reading material as gaeilge in Singapore, Auntie Louise was sent on a mission to get some kiddies books in Irish. I couldn’t find any in Easons at the weekend, but Waterstones and Hodges Figgis have a great selection of pre-school Irish books. So Santa/Auntie Louise is giving Stephen books for Christmas. I hope he doesn’t hate me for it when he is older!
I always resented the Irish language slightly. Its not that it isn’t great to be able to speak it a bit, and to be able to turn on TG4 and follow the gist, its the fact that I went to a secondary school where Irish wasn’t a priority; there was no grá for it amongst any of my Irish teachers over the years. One man in particular, a gaelgoir from Kerry by the name of Mr Walsh, never showed any enthusiasm. He may have loved the language, but he never gave much thought to teaching it to us. He convinced me and two others in my class to do honours Irish for the Leaving. We were the only 3 doing it in the school that year. And in the end, I changed down to pass on the day, even though I had done grand in the oral. I just didn’t need the hassle of the study for something I didn’t see any point in. And no one ever tried to show me that it had an place in my life. I worked my ass of in Maths, Engineering and Physics, because I needed them for college and for my future career, but Irish just doesn’t feature in my picture of the future. Unless you are going to be a teacher, does it really play any part in any of our lives anymore?
