A handy way to communicate

All in a Day's Work: Pat Matthews and Carmel Brennan, Irish sign language teachers

Pat Matthews is woken in the morning by a vibrating alarm clock especially designed for use by deaf people. Carmel Brennan has discovered a cheaper solution - a common or garden timer plug means that all the lights in her house come on at 7 a.m.

The pair teach the people who teach Irish sign language (ISL) throughout the State. Matthews lectures on subjects relating to the deaf community and culture and on specialised language areas such as law and medical terminology.

Brennan and Matthews's students travel from all over the State to attend the only fully recognised centre for training in sign language teaching at university level in Ireland. They both work hard to "sell" the idea of ISL teaching as a career. It is important to attract more people into training in this area, says Matthews. At the moment, it is a five-year pilot project.

The Trinity centre works closely with the centre for deaf studies at Bristol University. The Bristol programme has been a model, but the approach has been adapted to suit an Irish context. There is a vast difference between Irish and English sign language, say Matthews and Brennan. The ISL manual alphabet is one-handed, whereas BSL is two-handed. There was an attempt in the past to create a sort of signed Esperanto, called Gestuno, which could be used and understood all over the world. It didn't work. There are too many cultural and contextual differences to contend with. Brennan says that people mistakenly perceive ISL to be like a branch of English sign language. It has its own grammar rules and vocabulary, she explains.

It is important to encourage the use of ISL , Brennan says. It has cultural significance in much the same way as the Irish language. In the past, it was very hard for deaf people to find work here, so they tended to learn BSL in order to go to Britain to work. The vocabulary is quite different. It's part of the remit of the centre for deaf studies to protect and nourish ISL. That's why more teachers are needed.

Protecting the language is a passion for Matthews, and he spends much of his time recording and archiving ISL material. No library of ISL literature or teaching material currently exists. Brennan, meanwhile, gets a kick out of reinventing traditional stories for the deaf community to use in the classroom. For example, in the ISL version of Little Red Riding Hood the wolf tries to trick Red Riding Hood with his line "all the better to see you with", but she can't hear him, so his efforts are ineffective. He has to go away and learn sign language in order to complete his dastardly plan.

The teaching methods and curricula that Brennan and Matthews find effective will hopefully be used by the Irish deaf community for many years to come. Each year the number of applicants has grown.

Matthews's wife is deaf. His children are hearing, but the whole family uses ISL. He's glad that his children are bilingual, he says. ISL users are very proud of their language. The norm has been to put speech first - what people don't realise is that ISL is not just functional, it is a beautiful form of communication itself and one which users wish to protect and nurture. It is the indigenous language of the Irish deaf community.

In conversation with Louise Holden. Interpreting by Susan Foley Cave