Gaeilge goes global via World Wide Web

Irish-speaking areas in west Munster are hoping to create a "global Gaeltacht", writes Anne Lucey

Cape Clear Island off west Cork is proving fertile ground for the teaching of Irish - via the Internet, that is. Now just over six months old, the online live tuition service, Gaeltalk. net from Ireland's most southerly inhabited island, has a growing number of paid subscriber-students from Panama to Pennsylvania, and Japan to Argentina.

Most signing up, as might be expected, are American. But some, says founder Mr Tomás MacGearailt, are simply "language junkies".

Mr MacGearailt is originally from west Kerry. A native speaker, he was encouraged to teach Irish in San Francisco after leaving the US air force. This is where he came across the phenomenal interest in Irish, as well as those who just like to learn languages. The decision to set up a laboratory and on-line courses on Cape Clear was not just because most of the island's 150 inhabitants speak Irish, he explains from his company's administrative offices in Ballingeary, Co Cork.

Other satellite arms of his information management company which includes the Irish language bookstore www.litríocht.com are based in the Dromid and Cill Chúile Gaeltachta in Co Kerry. The link with the Munster Gaeltachta is designed to make a direct connection between them and the Irish diaspora around the world "to form a global Gaeltacht".

A secondary object, Mr MacGearailt says, is to get those learning from afar to come and visit the island and to stay in local B&Bs and visit the shops and pubs. "I met with people in Phoenix, Arizona, a few months back. The final test would be that they would go around the island using only Irish, ask for directions." They could do all this through Irish, either virtually or by coming to the island. Most like to visit in person, he adds.

Interest in learning Irish should not be underestimated. In New York, 44 different centres offer Irish classes. In California there are 20, while there are 28 centres offering Irish courses in New Jersey.

Many of the 70 million Irish diaspora want to learn the language, Mr MacGearailt says, and there are an estimated three million worldwide who speak it outside of Ireland. However, they find it difficult "to have a consistent supply of the product".

Live classes from Cape Clear where there is one full-time and three part-time teachers mean classes can be tailor-made to the time zones of students. This means in effect www. Gaeltalk.net offers tuition 24 hours a day, for only €20 or so a month.

Grammar and caint are only part of the fun. Each lesson comes with "a cultural capsule". Lesson one has a capsule on the Irish belief in the fairies. Lesson three takes learners through the experience of an Atlantic storm as it hits Cape Clear. Lesson four gives the history of seafaring around the Carberry coast in the 1900s.

There is a new Irish renaissance, Mr MacGearailt and those involved in Gaeltalk believe. This may be partly to do with the need to maintain identity in the EU. In any case, more people read and speak Irish today than in the last 150 years and the interest is growing.

Above all he hopes to create excitement in the Gaeltacht about Gaeltalk; the kind of excitement generated from creating jobs in Irish-speaking communities that support the language. "The Gaeltacht is continuing to die at a great rate. What I would like to see happening is one \ in every Gaeltacht."

Those learning Irish online at Gaeltalk offer a variety of reasons for logging on. One of the first things the tutors on Cape Clear got for Mr James Flynn (75) was the words in Irish of the prayer Hail Holy Queen. Born in Sydney, Australia, and a Christian Brother, he taught for 41 years before retiring.

"How did I come to be interested in the Irish language? As a boy, when I knelt down to say my prayers before going to bed at night, I would say a prayer in English and my father would say the same prayer in Irish. This left a lasting impression on me," he says by e-mail - his father was James Flynn of Killorglin, Co Kerry.

Ms Kathy Wood is a graduate of the University of California in psychology and linguistics. She works at Arizona State University and is returning to graduate school to do a masters in linguistics this autumn.

A member of a pipe band in Phoenix, she always wanted to learn Irish because of "the country, the music, the culture", but it always seemed like a brick wall. Then she signed up with Gaeltalk.net and the approach has opened the door to something she has wanted to do all her life.

"There's no book, no tape, no CD that can provide the personal interaction and the insight that I've been able to gain with regular live lessons with a native speaker," she says.

Australian Gaeltalk student Ms Carmel Hickson had Irish grandparents who spoke the language. She has retired from primary teaching and read about the course in an Australian-Irish magazine. She is learning the language because she is interested in all things Irish.