THE LAST STRAW: It's always an awkward moment when you bump into an old friend you haven't seen for years. It can be even more awkward when the two of you were once, well, deeply involved. I had just such an experience recently when, for the first time since school, I found myself face to face again with Irish, writes Frank McNally.
My former teachers would dispute the claim that I was ever deeply involved with any of the subjects they taught, Irish least of all. But in fact it was an intense enough relationship while it lasted. And the memory of it haunted me for many years after we parted, barely on speaking terms (as reflected in a D-minus in the Leaving Cert) but with a mutual feeling that it was for the best.
I had occasionally glimpsed the language in the years since then, through a shop window, or on a passing bus ("An Lár").
But a few months ago, there we were again, staring at each other across a crowded room. It wasn't a surprise meeting, to be honest, because the room was the pre-school I was bringing my daughter to, which is connected to the Gaelscoil she'll be attending later this year. So I had a fair idea that an encounter with Irish might arise. But I was still stuck for words - in a very real sense! - when it did.
The old language hadn't changed at all. She still had the same sentence construction, the same sophisticated grammar, the same possession by every noun of a gender (which is why I'm talking about her like this, in case you were wondering). And strikingly, after decades of secularisation in Irish society, the same strongly Christian values. "Dia Duit," I heard myself say.
"Dia is Muire Duit," she replied.
Looking back on my schooldays, I think that Irish and me drifted apart the year my class first visited the Gaeltacht for the summer. Most of the town boys went, but - excuse me while I turn on this violin music - us country lads were needed at home on the farm and stayed behind. Then September arrived, and it was obvious that the guys returning from Connemara had been the ones making hay.
Apparently the presence in the Gaeltacht of large numbers of female students - many of them city girls with a liberated outlook - added a whole different dimension to the study of Irish, and some of my contemporaries came back fluent in several new verbs, if you follow my drift.
The Gaeltacht experience gave those who did it a competitive edge in an important subject (as well as improving their Irish). And I think that as a result, I gradually sold my shares in the first official language, and invested heavily in the second, in the hope that Shakespeare's love sonnets would help me recover lost ground. As a result, all these years later, I'm returning to Irish almost as a beginner.
If the language itself hasn't changed since my schooldays, the perception of it has, and mostly for the better. When you think of Irish now, you don't so much think of Peig Sayers as of Sharon Ní Bheoláin (this could be a personal thing). Or you think of Hector Ó hEochagáin, the rocket-fuelled TG4 travel presenter, saying rude words in Irish to policemen in countries where you can be arrested for having a personality.
On the downside, the older you get, the harder it is to learn, as I've discovered from my experience with swimming - another pursuit I was forced into by the prospect that my kids would learn before me. But the pre-school teachers are very gentle with parents, knowing that many of us are not as quick on the uptake as our four-year-old children.
The Gaelscoil people are sympathetic too; although as I've discovered, they'll address you exclusively in Irish if you give them any encouragement. During our first conversation, I made the mistake of using the word "tuigim" (which means literally "I understand," and which I was using in the looser sense of "I don't understand, but I just remembered that word out of the blue and I felt the need to say something"). So naturally they kept talking to me in Irish and I just kept nodding gormlessly, like a 1970s car ornament. I'm still not sure what they told me, and I hope it wasn't important.
The school offers conversation classes for parents trying to brush up. I haven't ventured to any of these yet, but hopefully they'll be organised in the same way as swimming, with shallow conversation at one end of the room, and a clearly-marked deep end at the other. I'll be staying in the four-foot area for the foreseeable future. But maybe I can work on both swimming and language skills this summer, with a long-overdue beach holiday in the Gaeltacht.